Highways Agency

Spatial Planning and Sustainable Transport

Enabling Development through Sustainable Transport – the "Smarter Choices" agenda

The Highways Agency faces a huge challenge where new developments are likely to add a substantial amount of extra traffic onto its network, many parts of which already suffer from congestion.

The new spatial planning system signalled a major change in the relationship between transport networks and new developments. There is a far greater emphasis on demand management and not least upon "Smarter Choices" measures as a means of achieving it. This focus on managing demand to within the available capacity of the transport network is a major switch from the historical “predict and provide” approach of increasing capacity through provision of infrastructure improvements.

We are working to protect the network by ensuring developers minimise new trips as well as mitigating  the impacts of those trips, especially in growth points and areas.

Enabling Economic Growth whilst protecting future network performance

This challenge also presents a huge opportunity for us to help enable sustainable development:

• enabling job creation and local economic benefits to be realised
• furthering national economic prosperity and growth
• protecting the future performance of the Strategic Road Network (SRN)
• helping deliver reductions in CO2 emissions and wider environmental benefits

Planning Policy

Circular 2/2007 Planning and the Strategic Road Network

Department for Transport's Circular 02/2007, sets out how we will work in partnership with regional and local planning and transport authorities, public transport providers and developers to participate in all stages of the planning process to produce sound and deliverable strategies to ensure that developments are, in transport terms, as sustainable as possible.

The policy reinforces our approach to mitigating the transport impacts of development. We will seek to apply the following solutions iteratively:

• Impact avoidance through choice of sustainable location
• Impact minimisation through realistic Travel Plans
• Access management
• Capacity enhancements as last resort and only where compatible with suitable principles.

This approach is supported by a joint document, written by the Department for Transport and the Department for Communities and Local Government, called the Guidance on Transport Assessment.

This will assist stakeholders in determining whether an assessment may be required and, if so, what the level and scope of that assessment should be.

Planning Guidance

Planning Policy Guidance Note 13 (PPG13)

PPG13 explains the Government's principal policies relating to transport and planning. It ensures co-ordination between land use planning and transport. The aim of this is to reduce reliance on the private car, reduce the growth of motorised journeys and encourage the use of environmentally friendly transport.

Full details of the PPG13 are available on the Communities and Local Government web site.

PPG13 provides clear guidance for developers and to work in partnership with Local Planning Authorities "must submit plans for the development, implementation and maintenance of measures that will minimise the traffic generated by the development". PPG 13 also states that travel plans will have measurable outputs and set out arrangements for monitoring and enforcement.

Updated DfT guidance Using the planning process to secure travel plans (PDF) has been developed to reinforce the links with Regional Spatial Strategies and Local Development Frameworks. This also stresses importance of setting realistic targets, carrying out effective monitoring and enforcement. The document provides comprehensive advice with practical implementation.

Guidance on Transport Assessment has been developed and jointly issued by Department for Transport and Communities and Local Government.

Travel Plans

Travel Plans are much less expensive than traditional road infrastructure improvements, are more sustainable, reducing carbon impacts and improving air quality, and are far better value for money, typically 10 times better!

Although many contain similar elements, there is no such thing as a standard travel plan.  Although their common aims are usually to minimise car trips, particularly single occupancy vehicles (SOV) and to maximise uptake of sustainable access to these locations,. The best approach is to agree what the travel plan aims to achieve (its "outcomes"), identify the issues and opportunities in each development site (its strategy) and then develop a tailor-made package of initiatives which will achieve this (its "measures"). 

Monitoring

It is vital that there is a process of ongoing review of travel plans’ performance to ensure that their intended outcomes are realised. This will involve regular monitoring of results and this will enable remedial actions to be carried out to keep the plans on track.

Locking in the Benefits

The policy and guidance allows us to introduce complementary measures such as traffic management/access control or other developer-funded measures to ensure the original travel plans targets are realised and protect the performance of the strategic road network.

* 'Smarter travel choices' are techniques for influencing people's travel behaviour towards more sustainable options such as encouraging school, workplace and individualised travel planning. They also seek to improve public transport and promote services such as travel awareness campaigns, setting up websites for car share schemes, supporting car clubs and encouraging teleworking.