Planning is 50

My perspective is that of a town planner who, by accident, became a transport planner as well about 35 years ago. For 25 years after that I was responsible for both planning and transport policy for local authorities in major conurbations (Newcastle, Tyne & Wear and Birmingham). Since then I have worked as a consultant in both fields, and have dabbled also in political advising.

The rhetoric of ‘integration’ has been common currency throughout this time, but I have found myself engaged in what seems like a perpetual struggle to bring these two fields more closely together. Truly, engineers are from Mars and planners are from Venus!

This lecture presents some of the more curious paradoxes in UK transport and town planning that I have encountered while trying to ‘put transport in its place’. Examples include:

Though the effects of transport on patterns of settlement and activity are big enough to be visible from space, they play almost no part in transport decision-making;

While reducing congestion is the main aim of road investment in the UK it is doomed to failure, as congestion will always return (unless there is no economic case for the road!);

Economic evaluations of transport investment are driven by bottom-up considerations, but decision-making on priorities is almost exclusively top-down;

Co-locating jobs and houses is the main way that planners try to reduce the amount of travel; but while reducing the need to travel this has little effect on the propensity to do so;

‘Free’ roads have produced many of the perverse results we now see, but road pricing could easily make matters worse;

Non transport measures may be more effective than transport in dealing with congestion (and transport decisions can have some surprising results outside their remit).

While this will be presented in a fairly light-hearted way, there is a serious underlying purpose. The Stern Report on the economic consequences of climate change presents a particular challenge to the transport planner because transport is one of the largest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases. This is compounded by the unhealthy dependence of transport on fossil fuels which are increasingly scarce and hotly disputed.

I hope to persuade planners, engineers and economists that we all need to be open to new perspectives, and to work more closely together if we are to have any hope of resolving these issues.

Professor Alan Wenban-Smith
August 2007