Vision-led should be led by a vision

How can you have a vision-led transport statement or assessment without a vision? This will become an important first stage of the Development Transport Planners work

The late Peter Hall in his book Good Cities, Better Lives considered that the UK is no longer creating great urban spaces and has not done so for decades.

He views Bath, Edinburgh, the Garden Cities and the new towns as the great tradition, but that recent efforts at new communities have been “tawdry and superficial”.

There has perhaps been a lack of vision of what these places should be, however ‘Vision-led’ is now part of the transport planning vernacular and this may offer new hope to one of his stated problem areas; “linking people and places through integrated land-use and transport planning.”

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As part of case study research for my PhD, A study of Transport Planning in Large Scale Housing Developments in England, I sought to understand the vision for the permitted developments under construction that I was examining.

Any form of vision appeared to be in the hands of the developer and the masterplanner, and It was evident that there was a lack of a clear and meaningful vision amongst most of the schemes.

You gotta have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true?

Typically the vision was unclear to the planning professionals I interviewed and what was articulated was a basic understanding such as, “a sustainable location for development” or even “a residential estate.”

Perhaps the most telling response was from an experienced planning officer who said: "Later design code from reserved matters gives the vision - high quality, well-connected urban extension which adopts a green infrastructure-led approach and embraces sustainability at all levels to provide an exceptional place for people to live, work and play.”He then summed up: “Sounds like the sort of thing that is trotted out most times.”

Not a great endorsement, as the vision was seen as generic. However, all was not lost as a new town development I was researching had developed a stated vision that was consulted on and this included transport elements that were taken up and expanded upon in the Transport Assessment.

Interviews on this scheme suggested that the vision had been held onto to some degree through planning and implementation – at least in part – because it was clearly articulated and there was continuity of team members.

National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) 2024

We now find ourselves in England with an updated National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) 2024 that is wanting a ‘vision-led’ approach. Interestingly, ‘vision-led’ seems to be concerned with transport planning only and perhaps not other disciplines.

The NPPF definition is as follows:Vision-led approach: an approach to transport planning based on setting outcomes for a development based on achieving well-designed, sustainable and popular places, and providing the transport solutions to deliver those outcomes as opposed to predicting future demand to provide capacity (often referred to as ‘Predict and Provide’).

The vision-led approach is about setting outcomes and is based on achieving a good design. There is much policy and guidance to help us do this. The sustainable and popular place is perhaps open to different views of what that looks like depending on the consideration and extent given to transport modes. Some visioning here would be good.

Much of what the transport planning profession has identified for vision-led concerns the use of ‘Decide and Provide’ where scenarios of a future are adopted and these are examined. We design for the outcome we want not accepting a continuation of the past predicted into the future. 

NPPF paragraph 115 (d) identifies that in assessing sites that may be allocated for development in plans, or specific applications for development, it should be ensured that: …. any significant impacts from the development on the transport network (in terms of capacity and congestion), or on highway safety, can be cost effectively mitigated to an acceptable degree through a vision-led approach.

The vision-led approach here relies on Decide and Provide methodology and assessment to deal with these impacts. Our experience of Decide and Provide on projects where different scenarios are assessed has resulted in more time, effort and cost being put into traffic analysis and modelling, which seems ironic when we should perhaps be increasing technical work on public transport and active travel. It is evident scenario working needs to be manageable.

Those that have promoted this new thinking have brought some sense to the way we do things so we can move away from human forecasting, which has always be an ‘Achilles heel’, as David Banister puts it, of our method. Decide and Provide as a methodology is bedding in, but I do not consider it to be the only important aspect here; it has to be the visioning, creating a vision, even seeing a vision of the future development before getting into the detail of Decide and Provide.

It is worth considering what it means to have vision, and the Oxford Dictionary definition is useful to us in this respect. It is the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom. I would argue that we need both imagination and wisdom.

Our imagination that lets us form new ideas, images and concepts and is beautifully illustrated by Ebeneezer Howard’s conception of the garden city. Wisdom is where we bring our experience, knowledge and good judgement to bear to ensure that the vision can be delivered.

At NRP we sought to introduce visioning to the transport planning of a large new community through a visioning workshop in 2023 where the key transport stakeholders came together in person to contribute to its realisation.

We decided to use the Disney method, developed by Robert Dilts, as a means to develop the vision and this proved successful. The facilitated workshop employed the Disney method, allowing all attendees to view the development and transport requirements from the perspective of the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic. It is a production process starting with the dream:

• Dreamer – creates a vision for the future. Can define what is wanted and the benefits of having it;

• Realist – gives ideas tangible and concrete timeframe and assesses who can carry them out; and

• Critic – looks at what will work and what might go wrong and acts as filter.

It has been put like this:

If you just dream – it is not enough

If you just criticise – you won’t have many friends

If you just act it out – you may end up without a direction

The Dreamer, Realist and Critic positions allow the vision to be moulded. The exercise allowed us to develop a Vision Statement, a set of objectives and a set of principles for the scheme and each of these aspects is crucial. They overarched the Transport Assessment and the Decide and Provide scenarios to be tested.

In our workshop, which is no more than half a day, the stakeholders take Dreamer, Realist and Critic in turn individually writing down their thoughts in quiet and some pointers are provided to each perspective. Between consideration of each perspective there is an opportunity for individuals to feedback to the facilitator.

Following the workshop, careful analysis takes place to pull the contributions together and from this the vision statement, objectives and principles are drafted. It is also important that one person writes the vision for agreement and that it is succinct, as vision statements prepared by committee can become wordy and meaningless. Use the objectives and principles to pick up more of the detail that is needed.

This visioning exercise was undertaken in advance of the publication of the latest version of the NPPF, nonetheless it is considered that the approach is consistent and can be used to explore what it means in the specific context to be well designed, sustainable and popular.

NPPF paragraph 109 wants the vision-led approach from the earliest stages of plan making and sets out what this should involve; early engagement with local communities, ensuring transport considerations are integral to the scheme, addressing network impacts, realising transport infrastructure opportunities, pursuing public transport and active travel opportunities and assessing environmental impacts.

All of this can come into a visioning process, and can fit well with the Disney method approach we have successfully adopted.

We also need to recognise those people amongst the team and stakeholders who have a real vision of the place to be created, however incomplete this is, and support the best of their ideas. Within the group people there will naturally be the dreamer, the realist or the critic. Some are excellent at all three and all stakeholders should go through the production process and offer what they can. Everyone has a role to shape the vision of the place and how to get there.

It is important to remember that a transport vision will need to be part of a wider overall vision for the proposed development or sit under this overall vision. This should involve collaboration with the wider development team, or at least communication to ensure the transport vision is appropriate.

NPPF paragraph 118 states: All developments that will generate significant amounts of movement should be required to provide a travel plan, and the application should be supported by a vision-led transport statement or transport assessment so that the likely impacts of the proposal can be assessed and monitored.

How can you have a vision-led transport statement or assessment without a vision? This will become an important first stage of the Development Transport Planners work. Let’s leave our discourse with this:

You gotta have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true? 

Now that’s happy talk of vision-led that’s led by a vision.

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David Knight is Director of Transport Planning, NRP