Are Travel Plans (still) doing their bit?

Travel Plans have been common in transport planning for three decades. If a TP is intended to have a positive effect on travel patterns arising from a new development, why isn’t it integral to the TA/TS?

Travel Plans (TPs)have been common currency in transport planning for getting on for three decades.

As I recall, they started becoming a thing under New Labour, with the 1997 New Deal for Transport saying the government would “consider encouraging the incorporation of green transport plans into planning obligations”.

A decade later, the 2007 Guidance on Transport Assessment (withdrawn in 2014) stated that, “A travel plan is a package of site-specific initiatives aimed at improving the availability and choice of travel modes to and from a development… TPs are becoming an increasingly important tool in the delivery of sustainable outcomes.

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Join John Dales and a panel of experts to debate the future of travel plans: webinar on July 21, 10.30 -12.30. Register here

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They provide, together with transport assessments, the mechanism for assessing and managing access to sites. In addition, they can help improve accessibility, both to and from the site, and to local amenities and services.”

As of today, the gov.uk website describes travel plans as, “Long-term management strategies for integrating proposals for sustainable travel into the planning process. They... set measures to promote and encourage sustainable travel, and should, where possible, be considered in parallel to development proposals and readily integrated into the design and occupation of the new site rather than retrofitted after occupation.”

That is the theory. But, to rephrase a slogan from a 1998 government campaign to promote ‘smarter choices’, I think it’s high time we asked the question, “Are Travel Plans (Still) Doing Their Bit?”

Travel Plans come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, from integral elements of comprehensive sustainable transport strategies for major developments and events through to comparatively modest packages of proposals that largely comprise ‘soft’ measures intended to give an additional boost towards the mode share targets set out within their parent transport assessments/statements.

Monitoring is hardly ever done, and I have never seen there be any remedial action or other repercussions should Travel Plan promises be unfulfilled or targets unmet

My experience is that many travel plans, especially for developments towards the smaller end of that continuum, are little more than pointless (one might even say cynical) box-ticking exercises. In such cases, everyone seems to be going through the motions, and hardly anyone (if indeed anyone at all) really expects anything more than that a routine planning obligation will be formally met.

This is not to say that the intent of travel planning is not still worthy, but is to suggest that our familiarity with them, as planning hoops that need to be jumped through, has bred a form of contempt. They’re required; they’re produced; they often contain a well-worn list of ‘initiatives’; they’re signed off, along with a monitoring plan; and s106 money is assigned to this monitoring. However, monitoring is hardly ever done, and I have never seen there be any remedial action or other repercussions should Travel Plan promises be unfulfilled or targets unmet.

At the heart of this, as I see it, and have always seen it, is the unnecessary and – surely – illogical separation of TPs from their Transport Assessment and Transport Statement (TA/TS)parents. Why should ‘soft measures’ or ‘behaviour change initiatives’ or ideas about ‘smarter choices’ be considered separately? If the TA sets a (hopefully challenging) mode share target for a given mode of X%, what role does a stand-alone TP have? Whatever benefit the measures proposed within a TP are intended to have, even if just nudges, should surely be reflected in the main TA/TS itself. 

That, in any case is my contention. There’s been some talk among professional, recently, of the need to rethink Transport Assessments – as ‘Accessibility Assessments’ or (my idea) ‘Movement Plans’. However, while I believe this is necessary, I don’t think we need to wait for that until we have a mature debate about where Travel Planning should fit into the process.

Let’s have that debate now! 

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John Dales is Co-Founder + Director at Urban Movement