The crucial role of transport planning in achieving a net zero landscape
Article posted on: 11 July 2024
Clancy is regularly engaged from the very outset of developments to provide transport planning and pre-planning advice. We offer a suite of specialist transport planning services designed to help our clients navigate and overcome planning challenges.
Transport planning underpins and acts as a catalyst for almost all development and regeneration that we see around us. By developing and applying policy and forming strategies, we play a crucial role in the design of urban, rural and community regeneration projects; shaping the public realm and how we move through it.
The biggest overhaul to transport in a generation
In her first address to Department for Transport (DfT) staff on 8 July 2024, the new Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, promised to deliver the biggest overhaul to transport in a generation. Delivering greener transport and better integrating transport networks featured amongst her five strategic priorities. We fully embrace this commitment from the UK Government and are excited to align our transport planning services with these visionary goals.
Our skilled and experienced team is well versed in applying innovative methods to reduce the overall need to travel and to promote sustainable, active travel, with the priority goals of health, wellbeing, safety, and carbon emission reductions at the forefront of all that we do.
Our services range from the production of transport statements / assessments to support the development of buildings, to advising on the formulation of large-scale masterplans for transformational town and city-wide regeneration. A current example is our involvement in the evolving masterplan for the transformation of Liverpool’s north shore docklands for Peel Waters.
One essential service, critical for both new residential schemes and the development and regeneration of urban landscapes, is the production of a travel plan.
What are travel plans?
Travel plans are long-term management strategies for integrating proposals for sustainable travel into the planning process. They are based on evidence of the anticipated transport impacts of development and set measures to promote and encourage sustainable travel, such as promoting walking and cycling.
Travel plans should, where possible, be considered in parallel to development proposals and be readily integrated into the design and occupation of the new site, rather than retrofitted after occupation.
Why are travel plans important?
Travel plans can positively contribute to:
encouraging sustainable travel
lessening traffic generation and its detrimental impacts
reducing carbon emissions and climate impacts
creating accessible, connected, inclusive communities
improving health outcomes and quality of life
improving road safety
reducing the need for new developments to increase existing road capacity or provide new roads
Hierarchy of movement and mobility – when we plan how people will access and move around any new development or regeneration area. This diagram shows the order of priority, with active travel first and placing car users last.
Where do travel plans fit within the wider planning process?
The first real mention of a travel plan usually occurs during pre-application consultation with the local planning authority. For new developments, the planning application’s validation checklist will likely include the need for an interim travel plan.
A travel plan should be produced in combination with a transport statement or transport assessment, forming an iterative process.
Measures to encourage walking, cycling and the use of public transport should be hard-wired into a development’s masterplan from the very beginning.
Transport statements & assessments
Following our work to ensure a development proposal is underpinned by a well-thought-out access and movement strategy, we would produce a transport assessment (or transport statement) to accompany the suite of other documents in support of the planning application, including the travel plan.
Balancing car parking in new developments is a common challenge. Justifying lower car parking ratios is easier if the site masterplan includes measures to promote active travel and public transport use.
Reducing car parking results in less traffic, minimizing the impact on the surrounding road network and reducing the need for costly junction capacity improvements. More importantly, it helps achieve carbon net zero targets.
What is ‘active travel’?
Active travel simply means making journeys in physically active ways, including walking, wheeling and cycling. It often relates to short journeys such as cycling to work, walking to school or to visit friends.
This term has been around for a number of years, however, only recently has the government set up a specific executive agency called Active Travel England (ATE) which has “a responsibility to make walking, wheeling and cycling the preferred choice for everyone to get around in England”.
ATE will be a statutory consultee for new planning applications, particularly for larger developments. ATE has a toolkit to review a development proposal’s compliance with local and national policy and guidance which will determine whether they object.
How can Clancy assist?
At the very early stage of developing a masterplan for new residential developments, the hard-wiring of initiatives to promote sustainable travel is essential to the future success of a travel plan.
This where we help by supporting the project team to identify the travel needs of future residents.
We seek to incorporate direct and safe walking and wheeling routes within the masterplan, linking to the surrounding established network of footways and cycleways which in turn allow access to local facilities and services such as schools, healthcare, employment and shopping.
For larger development proposals, this could include identifying opportunities to bring bus services into the site, with early consultation with the council and bus operators to explore the feasibility and to examine route options together.
Through similar consultations, we can identify whether the council may have strategic proposals in the area for new cycle routes, which we can help a residential development proposal to interface with, or incorporate into, the site masterplan. Therefore ensuring the site forms part of a wider strategy, and can assist with how the proposed development is received by neighbouring residents and stakeholders.
Travel Plan Coordinator role
A travel plan includes a requirement to nominate a Travel Plan Coordinator (TPC). The role of the TPC is to ensure that the travel plan is implemented and that the proposed measures and incentives to promote active travel and public transport use are fully pursued - we can do this for you.
The TPC also monitors travel habits annually and reports to the council, often for up to six years post-occupation.
The key is to demonstrate that we've engaged with the council's Travel Plan Officer and that we've actively implemented the measures and initiatives contained in the travel plan.
Find out more
Our transport planning team has over 30 years’ experience delivering expert advice nationwide, helping to reduce carbon emissions and improve wellbeing through encouraging active travel.
They are also able to offer CPD sessions to explain how we can help in further detail.
If you would like speak to the team to learn more about our transport planning services or arrange a CPD, please get in touch with Keith York.