Local Planning for Transport and the Environment

Abstract

The increasing focus on the needs of the environment within transport planning is shifting attention towards the part local government can play in changing patterns of travel. In the Conservative government’s final years in office it called upon local authorities to implement new policies for transport and the environment in its planning guidance document, PPG13, and policy document, Transport: The Way Forward (DoE and DoT, 1994; DoT, 1996b). Since 1947, ‘town and country planning’ has been the responsibility of local councils. The making of land-use plans, which try to match the demands of developers and the environment with transport provision, is a task that falls to ‘local planning authorities’. Councils make the first judgment on whether a planning application meets the transport criteria laid down in their plans. Most journeys are local, and therefore perhaps susceptible to being modified by the transport policies of local authorities. Thus councils seem to be in a prime position for using their transport and land-use planning strategies to minimize the need to travel, and to reduce the use of transport in its more environmentally damaging forms.