Traditionally urban space design has always favoured vehicle movement over pedestrian movement and the need for high quality transportation infrastructure in order to promote urban growth and to facilitate the movement of goods and people is well understood and illustrated in every aspect of today’s modern cities. But now we are witnessing a shift in design trends and policy and it is no longer the case that the car rules supreme; indeed, urban space designers are increasingly becoming...

Sydney is Australia’s largest and most densely populated city, with a population of 4.6 million. The city’s central business district (CBD) covers an area of approximately 2 square miles, is bounded on two sides by water and contains 32 million square metres of floor space. More than 180,000 people live in the city of Sydney, sharing the space with about 20,000 businesses. Every day approximately 400,000 people arrive to work in this area, and another 500,000 travel to the city for...

How do people navigate through a building, a train station or an airport? What happens when you need to evacuate an area, or if a number of exits have to be shut for various reasons? Will the occupants still make it out safely?    MassMotion enables engineers to create complex pedestrian simulations very easily using standard 3D model data from software such as Revit or ArchiCAD. Engineers can then quickly perform sensitivity analysis and ‘what-if’ scenarios, measure...

One hundred and one years after the compulsory appointment of medical officers of health by local authorities, the NHS Reorganisation Act 1973 set in train the removal of the public health function from local authorities. Consequently, most transport planning practitioners working today will have no recall of this 1970s milestone (and not all public health practitioners will either). Public health has spent most of its life within municipal government.The sanitary reform movement of the 19th...

Edwina Hart has taken over the transport portfolio in Wales from Carl Sargeant in a ministerial reshuffle. Hart adds transport to her existing economy portfolio. But, in a surprise move, walking and cycling have been taken out of transport and passed to the minister for culture and sport, John Griffiths. He will have responsibility for taking forward the Welsh Government’s Active Travel Bill....

THE CONTEXT for the following comments is set partly by some work I’m currently doing to explore further the extent to which the ‘place’ value of streets and spaces can credibly be monetised, and partly by my rant a couple of months back relating to how conventional modelling outputs are often little more than “numbers masquerading as facts”. What I want to talk about is a classic case of the following: “Not everything that can be counted counts; and what...

The DfT has published a method for monetising the benefits of pedestrianisation and other urban realm schemes. The method is explained in a research report commissioned by the DfT from consultant Atkins and the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. The research was completed in January 2011 but only released last week. In a note accompanying the report, the Department says: “WebTAG [transport appraisal guidance] currently has no guidelines for monetising the...

Methodist pioneer and evangelist John Wesley visited these parts, on foot, in 1757. Whilst his reception in some of the surrounding villages was less than friendly, he received a warm welcome in Golcar. He commented that the people of Golcar were “as gentle as lilies when compared with the uncouth and ignorant peoples of Bolster Moor and Scapegoat Hill”. Which is possibly how Golcar folk came to be known as ‘Golcar Lilies’ though I’m aware of at least five other...

Transport has always fascinated Dave Merrett. As a child he ran the school transport society; it wasn’t all steam trains, there was Scalectrix too. He went on to become a civil engineer in British Rail’s bridge design and assessment team. Today, at the age of 58, he still works part-time for Amey on Network Rail’s bridge assessment contract. But it’s through his political career as a York city councillor that Merrett has been able to put his wider ideas about transport...

The Welsh Government  plans to ringfence a proportion of its Regional Transport Plan Grant to ensure local authorities deliver walking and cycling schemes in support of the forthcoming Active Travel (Wales) Bill. The Bill will require Wales’ 22 local authorities to map walking and cycling routes, and to make “continuous improvement’ to the routes. Publication is expected in February and the Bill should complete the Assembly’s legislative processes by October,...

The number of car and vans available to households in England and Wales rose by 14%, from 23.9 million to 27.3 million, between 2001 and 2011, newly published data from the 2011 census has revealed. In London, however, the number of ‘car-free’ households increased significantly over the decade. The Office for National Statistics data shows that the 3.4 million increase in the number of cars/vans available in England and Wales over the last ten years broadly matches the increase in...

NEW GUIDANCE by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) on how local authorities can enact measures to boost walking and cycling (see p4) was greeted with rage by The Daily Mail on 28 November. Describing the guidance as “Nanny watchdog’s plan to get Britain fit”, the paper focused on just one aspect of NICE’s suggestions, stating that: “Drivers should be charged more for parking to make them walk instead, health chiefs said...

Transport for London is beginning work to improve conditions for cyclists and pedestrians at the first of 50 road junctions on the Barclays Superhighways and Transport for London Road Network. The aim is to have changes to ten junctions completed by the end of the year, a further 15 by mid-2013 and 25 more by the end of 2013. For each junction, TfL consults a small group of stakeholders including the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) and Living Streets on three-four options.  After receiving...

While it seems that most of the transport planning profession is convinced there is a strong evidence base for the impact of Smarter Choices (they usually top the list of the most effective measures in the TPS annual survey), there are still some who can’t reconcile them with the use of traditional transport models. In these models, the so-called “soft” measures seem always downplayed and inadequately (sometimes wrongly) represented. For smaller scale schemes, this is not a...

When I see an adult on a bicycle”, HG Wells allegedly said, “I do not despair for the future of the human race”. The notion that active travel is a “good thing” is not new. But the political and practical treatment of active travel has changed significantly in recent years, not least in London. The idea of “active travel” is imprecise. It is generally taken to mean walking, cycling and wider behaviour changes stimulated by travel demand management...

The UK’s experience in travel behaviour change tools is advanced and has spanned 15 years in many areas. Transport authorities in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East have rolled out travel plan programmes using best practices from the UK. In August, the Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) launched its first travel plan programme to determine whether success in travel behaviour change achieved in the UK and elsewhere can be replicated there. The programme, branded as...

Reggie Tricker has joined the City of Edinburgh Council as a professional officer to lead the city’s street design guidance and marketing of walking and cycling. Tricker moves from Somerset County Council, where he has been travel plan co-ordinator for the last five years....