12 minute read
The place of transport
Chippenham masterplan. © Create Streets
Transport and environment journalist Laura Laker looks at the pivotal role of transport in the UK today, and why landscape, place and connection is key to unlocking its potential as a driver of social and environmental justice and to secure a sense of belonging.
The former transportation commissioner for New York City, Janette Sadik-Khan, tells the story of a careers chat she had with her grandmother. If you want to make a difference, she was told, go into sanitation or transportation. How early and to what extent we gain our independence as children can be defined by our journey to school. In adulthood transport affects which jobs we can take – those on a low wage especially need affordable transport options to access opportunities of any sort.
Transport impacts our access to social activities and healthcare throughout our lives, but particularly in older age when driving may no longer be an option and the ability to stay active is dictated by density of housing, access to good walking, cycling and public transport options. Into older age, or for those of us with disabilities, traffic profoundly impacts our connections with our neighbours and our very ability to leave the house and move about our localities in safety.
Transport can generate air and noise pollution, or it can be used to boost our mental and physical wellbeing, connect us to people, cut our risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease, even diabetes and our risk of broken bones. Well-designed streets and places with green space embedded protect our mental and physical health in profound ways we are just beginning to understand.
The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) points out that all sectors, particularly transport, have to do more to reach net zero. Achieving this will require substantial investment in infrastructure. While electric vehicle uptake will go some way to meet this goal, they are not the whole solution and in part perpetuate the challenges of a car-dependent society. More walking, cycling and public transport are needed – things that also deliver on health and environmental goals, as well as social justice. Arguably, a holistic approach to delivering these networks is highly beneficial for our transport choices, connecting people, communities and the places around them.
Alister Kratt, Director at LDA Design, Fellow of the Landscape Institute, and a member of the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) Design Group, takes the view that while transport planners may look at individual modes of travel, landscape architects see in a broader sense the structural components of how we move around, in terms of democratic and accessible connection. While the wealthy and well-connected “are able to move around with absolute freedom using any mode of transport they wish, either nationally or locally or globally”, he points out, in rural and low-income communities access to transport can be poor. In other words, it’s a social justice issue.
The way we think about transport is, to some extent, being flipped on its head, he believes, with the goal of tackling some of those issues. Historically, settlements often grew at the intersections of roads or train stations. While the historic foundation of many settlements grew from good road connection, the very nature of road connectivity generates many of the problems some settlements experience today.
“That‘s not to dismiss those settlements as communities and places, because they’ve been fundamentally important economic and social influences,” says Kratt. “The issue now is how do we plan for good? I think the position we’re now in is that we are thinking much more about establishing the communities as place and then securing the connections appropriate to support that place.” The philosophy of place-based settlements, he argues, is not tail wagging dog; it’s dog wagging tail. This change in approach is key, he argues. Taking transport as connection, settlement, place and belonging, and considering strategically the landscape as the context for these relationships, is fundamental to structuring good outcomes, beyond a single neighbourhood, town or city. These boundaries should all join up in good place planning.
Policy has helped refocus transport around the regional, via reports like the NIC’s National Infrastructure Assessment (NIA). The NIA states that while the UK is moving towards devolving transport funding to major city regions, “investment is required to facilitate sustainable trips within and between English cities”. Transport is part of a solution to reducing disparities in economic outcomes and quality of life, it notes. Kratt sees a smarter approach, one the industry is moving towards, establishing desired environmental and community outcomes first, and working out how to meet those outcomes at the drawing board. For cities, that might mean whether new homes are built within the urban core to secure regenerative outcomes and walkable neighbourhoods, extending urban suburbs with good rail connection using a gentle density model to use land more efficiently, or whether it makes more sense to develop elsewhere using zero carbon principles for essentially car-free new settlements.
David Milner, Director of Create Streets, believes, “for too long we’ve defaulted to concreting over the countryside with sprawling housing estates driven by prediction-led transport planning.”
Low-density housing, he argues, swallows up too much land and demands too many roads be built, absorbing funds that could be better spent elsewhere. In a report titled Stepping off the Road to Nowhere (Create Streets and Sustrans, 2024), he argues in favour of ‘gentle density’ and ‘vision-led planning’. For the UK’s 1.5m new homes target, the report reimagined new housing estates as mixed-use developments, with shops and schools integrated within neighbourhoods, using Chippenham as a case study. For the £75m allocated by Homes England for roads, he says this alternative plan would allow “town builders, not housebuilders” to instead deliver an array of benefits. That includes:
£6.5m for Chippenham’s bus plan, £15m for safe walking and cycling routes, a rail passing loop, car clubs across the site, £6m to subsidise rents for shops within the new site whilst it gets off the ground, £10m for Chippenham’s town centre to benefit locals and money for highways.
These moves, he says, would generate 9,300 more walking and cycling trips, 12,000 fewer vehicle trips, and cut projected CO₂ emissions by 2,000 tonnes. It would also, he adds, save an area the size of the Isle of Wight in land, and deliver better social connection for the new community by creating neighbourhoods where people, not vehicles, are the priority.
The National Planning Policy Framework, meanwhile, recommends proactive mitigation to challenges like flood risk and overheating, caused by climate change – but it still tends towards reactive mitigation of transport projects in its language. New transport infrastructure, including cycle lanes, from Cardiff to Glasgow to London, are increasingly incorporating things like sustainable drainage (SuDS) and tree planting, not only to absorb water from heavy rainfall events but also to provide shade and public amenity, softening the streetscape and encouraging active journeys. This shift requires proactive planning, however, and the now mandatory requirement for SuDS in England is a step in the right direction.
In terms of thinking on a ‘town scale’ or bigger, rather than in terms of modes or individual plots, change is coming from city regions.
At a city level, Edinburgh represents a very visible example of learning on this. In a project conceived over a decade ago, two new tram lines caused issues for broader connectivity.
On Princes Street, cycle lanes were simply painted around the tram, at times putting cyclists in danger.
On Leith Walk, this ‘tram first’ approach resulted in a confusing streetscape with a slalom cycle lane, a roadway that struggled to accommodate even the trams, and a poor pedestrian realm.
A new approach, led by the city’s Head of Place, Daisy Narayanan MBE and launched this year, seeks to put place at the heart of transport. A Streetspace Allocation Framework is the starting point. To meet 2030 targets of both net zero and a 30% reduction in car traffic, the plan seeks to achieve a balance between these competing demands by prioritising place, walking and wheeling, cycling and public transport, over private motorised traffic and parking. With this guiding goal, a series of maps lay out the desired place functions of streets, including networks for bus, tram, walking, cycling, taxis and private car traffic. As part of this new joined-up philosophy, and the policy documents accompanying it, in theory every network will be delivered by giving each street two or so modes, led by connectivity, not competing modes. Placemaking is key to this: viewing the city based on its streets’ neighbourhood and place functions, as well as their through-route functions and different modes.
City officials hope it will prevent repeating the mistakes of the ‘tram-first’ approach and, because it’s part of a unified citywide plan, the council can avoid some of the historic backlash, and the street-by-street legal battles that accompanied that. Cllr Scott Arthur, convener for transport and the environment, says the plans will also help deliver homes for 36,000 more people without inducing gridlock in an already traffic-congested city.
Edinburgh’s in-house bus service carries 30% of all bus journeys in Scotland, and the plan is to expand and integrate its use substantially across the city. Nationally, siloing of transport is slowly reversing, with policies like Bus Back Better seeking to integrate bus transport with other modes, such as active travel. This more unified delivery of buses will offer greater influence over how the bus network integrates with the local landscape and its users, such as providing access by making surrounding developments permeable to those users. Greater Manchester is a forerunner of this, as the city’s Bee Network brings bus services back under city control, as part of a unified transport network.
In rural areas, the Create Streets report notes, Somerset and Oxfordshire County Council are already prioritising ‘vision-led’ transport planning akin to its Chippenham case study. The NIC’s National Infrastructure Assessment report adds that such public transport upgrades will help unlock economic growth, along with a ‘new comprehensive and long-term rail plan’ for the North and the Midlands. In the West Midlands, the combined authority led by mayor Andy Street is delivering, with local authorities, a cycleway adjacent to the HS2 line, bringing together active travel connections for local communities across a 23-mile corridor by repurposing existing haul and access roads as green transport corridors.
While policies and industry may be beginning to tackle what some see as the tyranny of transport planners at a national level, the debate has become caught up in the culture wars at a local one. Proposals to restrict councils’ abilities to control motor traffic and make walking and cycling more appealing via measures like low traffic neighbourhoods and 20mph zones, as well as entreating councils not to enforce traffic contraventions so rigorously, and limiting where the money from fines can be spent, could have the opposite impact.
The British Parking Association says, “the current rhetoric and implied punishments for councils is proving to be extremely damaging and misleading” on this topic.
Alister Kratt says, nationally, both rail and bus services are being viewed increasingly as parts of an integrated network that can support good spatial and settlement planning, placemaking and new communities.
“I think ultimately, the ideal scenario for landscape architects is to be involved in transport strategy planning, because of its consequences on the design of place, both at strategic scale and local scale within towns and cities.”
Placemaking founded on connectivity is ultimately a collaborative endeavour, he says; that’s “not just greening and paving space and streets and making it look attractive. It’s about understanding place and how it’s defined; how spaces are activated and how good design can influence behaviour, movement and support connection. The role of a landscape architect is to support that wider-outcomes thinking and make sure that it is delivered through design founded on strategic thinking.”
While most local authorities and commissioning agencies understand the role of interdisciplinary and collaborative working, the challenge ahead is to make sure that landscape professionals have the opportunity to help lead the thinking. Rather than responding to predetermined mobility and connection strategies, they must be empowered to form an active part in their development.
says Kratt. Only then will the full potential of transport to make a positive difference to people, place and nature be realised.
Laura Laker is a journalist specialising in active travel and transport, and the author of Potholes and Pavements: a Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network (Bloomsbury, 2024).
