Postscript - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 433

25.3 Priority objectives: reducing traffic growth and protecting
accessibility
Before exploring the measures which could contribute to large-scale behavioural
change we need to reflect on the criteria which would be used to assess them. Clearly
little progress would be made if, as now, business-as-usual criteria are used to assess
policies which are aimed at something completely different! Hopefully the NATA
refresh exercise will result in some changes being made in this direction, but probably
not on a sufficiently radical scale.
The central problem with current planning and appraisal methods is that every
potential intervention is viewed incrementally so that increases in car travel are
judged to be benefits even though, in aggregate - over the longer term and taking
account of second-order effects on land use activity - they ultimately make conditions
worse. Accessibility may be maintained or even improved in the interim (for people
with use of a car) but only through greater mobility and car dependence which cannot
be sustained.
Our perception of what constitutes an 'improvement' would be fundamentally
different if we were to adopt accessibility rather than mobility as our goal and to revise
planning and appraisal procedures accordingly. The overall objective would then be to
maintain or improve accessibility (opportunities) whilst minimising the costs involved
in utilising them, i.e. by reducing the volume of travel and the share made in the form
of single-occupancy vehicles. This has two further important corollaries:

1 'Transport planning' would be removed from its preoccupation with catering

for movement and would embrace other means of promoting or safeguarding
opportunities. These include use of ICT, home or local deliveries, land use planning
and the management of public facilities. Conversely planning in other sectors
should be required to account for (and minimise) its transport consequences. It is
bizarre that, at present, the 'non-transport' arms of Government propose closures
of post offices, GP surgeries, cottage hospitals, magistrates courts and the like in
order to make financial savings whilst the transport arm proposes expenditure
to cope with the increasing volume of travel and then uses time-savings as its
principal justification!

2 'Accessibility planning' (in the sense in which it is employed in LTPs, i.e. to

counter social exclusion) would become part of mainstream transport planning
and not, as at present, treated as a form of residual damage limitation exercise,
whilst the main investment strategies focus on catering for increased mobility.
Critically, if increasing demands are met instead with measures to improve
accessibility by modes other than the car, the whole population benefits and the
growing polarisation in opportunities available to people with and without use of
a car is avoided.

The idea that we should set out to reduce or limit traffic volumes as a central
objective of national and local policies - and hence that we might adopt 'traffic
reduction targets' - has been fiercely resisted by DfT (DETR 2000d). This is on the
basis that traffic growth is not itself a problem but that traffic-related problems are
(congestion, CO 2 , pollution, safety etc.). Hence it is argued we should focus attention
on - and set targets for - dealing with these problems as and where they occur and can
be dealt with most cost-effectively.