Friday, October 3 2008
Over 50 local authority planning and transport professionals, from across the north of England, attended a JMP workshop in Manchester on 16 September, on ‘transport and land-use plans’.
The half-day event started with an excellent presentation from academic Peter Headicar (from Oxford Brookes University). Well known amongst the planning profession, Peter lived up to his reputation for both academic rigour and controversy, giving a critical run-through of 30 years of Government’s shortcomings in getting land use planning and transport to work better together!
Martin Revill of JMP outlined the changing Government agenda and how the ever-growing role of regional transport decision-making is likely to affect local authority transport planning in the future; while Highways Agency network strategy manager Jonathan Reade, along with JMP’s Nicola Kane, explained how ‘accessibility mapping’ and related tools can anticipate a transport impact, to inform better decisions on the location of development in local planning frameworks.
Three workshops sparked broad debate and addressed delegates key concerns, which ranged from: how the climate change agenda could affect transport and planning options; linking Local Development Framework policies to Local Transport Plan accessibility targets and objectives; through to and how far ‘smarter choices’ measures can help limit the vehicle traffic impacts of developments and allow greater levels of regeneration to be accommodated within local areas and networks. Copies of presentations from the event will be available on the website shortly.
A post-workshop summary highlighted some other areas where JMP has skills to help address local authority concerns on modelling, strategy development, transport evidence reviews, and using DfT’s Guidance on Transport Assessments to improve the development control process.
Feedback suggests that the attendees found the workshop fulfilling and useful, and JMP will now be seeking to organise similar free events on other major topics, elsewhere in the country.