Postscript - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 431

that have re-engineered their whole structure of economic and leisure activities
away from such an increasingly unobtainable or unaffordable commodity will
have an efficiency premium of self-sufficiency and welfare.
(ibid.)
In any case it is quite wrong, as do Eddington and the RAC Foundation, to
contemplate the future of transport without considering the spatial development
context within which it will be operating and indeed whose objectives it should be
serving. We have for the last 10-15 years begun to reverse the long-term trends of
counter-urbanisation and to pursue policies of regeneration and urban renaissance.
The economic, social and cultural capital of large towns and cities is being put to good
use.
This is 'sustainable development' in its wider sense (ODPM 2005d) and includes
reducing the need to travel, retaining local facilities, encouraging the use of non-car
modes and maintaining opportunities for people without use of a car - a combination
which offers economic, environmental, social and health benefits. The corollary of
this strategy is to restrict significant development in rural areas, thereby enabling the
protection of the countryside and its ecology and retaining it as a resource for local
agricultural production, recreation and tranquility.
Proposals for major road investment around or between cities run completely
counter to such a strategy by delivering a relative accessibility advantage to peri-urban
areas and sites near junctions along the inter-urban corridors. This inevitably results
in the dispersal of land use activity, in longer, mostly car-based trips and pressures
for development in 'unsustainable' locations. We are currently living with the
consequences of the 'first generation' of motorways and trunk roads in this respect and
self-evidently do not need a second generation of this kind.
It is also amazing that the RAC Foundation imagines that an additional 'super-
network' of inter-urban roads might ever gain political acceptance; if the first
generation ground to a halt in the face of fierce public opposition in the 1990s a second
is hardly likely to be welcomed in today's more sensitive environmental climate. If
there is to be major new inter-urban infrastructure then this must surely take the form
of rail lines which can operate with electric traction from the outset and which deliver
accessibility advantages to urban centres and key regeneration and growth locations in
the manner of the first high speed route to the Channel Tunnel.
It is just possible that, several decades hence, having completed the transition to
low or zero carbon motoring, and with a continuing population increase, the case for
additional capacity on main inter-urban roads may deserve to be reviewed. However,
by that time this would almost certainly consist of more efficient utilisation of existing
infrastructure (i.e. bringing individual vehicles under some degree of automated
control to permit closer headways) rather than the primitive device of building new
swathes of concrete across the countryside.
A further reason for needing to link the planning of inter-urban transport with
the spatial development context is to consider the 'whole journey' of trips which are
expected to constitute the additional demand on inter-urban roads. In a 'business as
usual' scenario some of this growth in vehicle mileage would result from continued
increases in trip length but most of it would be the product of population growth
and of increases in car ownership. However this is to ignore the changing conditions
which will characterise travel within towns and cities from where the bulk of trips will
continue to start and finish.