It’s now over a week since Landor’s excellent ‘New Era of Housing Development’ conference on integrating planning and transport. It’s time I shared my thoughts and reflections!

Firstly, it was a privilege to join such a great speaker line-up. Huge congratulations to Colin Black for masterminding a fantastic programme!

Colin opened the day with a sobering reminder of the hopes that have been raised and dashed over the decades, that we might manage to integrate transport and housing so as to support sustainable transport and reduce car-dependence.

A Royal Town Planning Institute report published that day reinforced his point (see media coverage), showing that we made no progress on this between 2012 and 2021.

A subsequent report from New Economics Foundation provides evidence that, actually, we’ve gone backwards. I’ll say more about this excellent report another time.

We had several useful perspectives on the challenges and possible solutions from local authorities, bus operators, Homes England, National Highways and others.

David Milner outlined CREATE STREETS‘s great work in showing how more homes can be built on less land, generating less motor traffic (and hence fewer objections), by building to ‘gentle’ densities close to rail stations.

My own presentation picked up these themes. Whilst welcoming the Government’s stated intention to adopt a ‘vision-led’ approach to planning and transport, I added that the Government will need to define its vision, so that local authorities, developers and (crucially) public inquiry inspectors are all guided by the same vision. Speciflcally, it needs to be a vision in which there are at least 20% fewer vehicles on our roads by 2030, if the transport sector is to play its part in meeting the UK’s legally-binding climate targets.

 
I then suggested possible ways to test objectively whether a proposed development location or proposal will be suitable in terms of connectivity / accessibility by public transport and active travel, or whether it is likely to lock in car-dependence.

I’m glad Martin Gilmour – Deputy Director for Planning, Transport and Housing at the Department for Transport (DfT) – was there to answer my question about whether DfT’s Connectivity Tool might help answer this need. I hope DfT will now let us sustainable transport advocates see what it can or can’t do.

However, to my mind, the day’s most telling presentation came from Phil Jones. He argued that, despite changes in the name of the Government’s guidance on assessing the transport impacts of new developments, the process is still basically about assessing motor traffic impacts, and whether a development will require the provision of significant new road or junction capacity. Prof Peter Jones (no relation!) argued that it should instead be about how to stay below the threshold where such capacity is needed.

In short, lots of food for thought. I hope the Government takes note, so we don’t spend the next 5 years building another 1.5 million car-dependent new homes!