Population, land use and travel - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 30

therefore it is - or should be - possible to make trips on foot, by bike or by bus in much
the same way as it was 50 years ago. This was not the objective of containment policy
but it is of enormous importance today. It would be very much more difficult now to
pursue sustainable travel policies otherwise.
From another perspective however the policy of urban containment has had less
fortunate outcomes. The physically freestanding towns to which much new housing
has been allocated - including the deliberately planned 'New Towns' - do not function
in the predominantly self-contained way they did fifty or even thirty years ago (Breheny
et al. 1993). Increased incomes and mobility have greatly enhanced the opportunities
which people seek to fulfil, the choices they exercise, and the volume of travel they
make accordingly.
Much inter-urban commuting derives from variations in local housing markets with
better-off people in some areas choosing to live at a distance from their workplace
and less well-off people being forced to in others. However the counter-urban shift in
residential location has not been due solely to the effects of planning policy or housing
markets on people who remain tied to employment in main urban areas. Major changes
have taken place also in the geography of workplaces linked to changes in the nature
of employment itself (Gillespie 1999).
The consequences of de-industrialisation experienced in the 1970s and 80s were
felt most severely in the conurbations where traditional manufacturing and distribution
activities were concentrated. (Many such areas have since been regenerated for
residential purposes, contributing to their turn-round in population over the last 10-
15 years.) More significantly the expansion of service employment, particularly in the
private sector, took place predominantly in freestanding towns and rural areas. Of the
2.9 million net new jobs of this type created between 1981 and 1996, 70% were located
in such areas.
As with population trends however such statistics can be misleading since
developments near the edge of cities may be located within the administrative area of
the adjoining 'rural' district or freestanding town. Many of the new breed of business
parks located close to motorway junctions fall into this category. It would be wrong
therefore to infer that there has been a general dispersal of new employment. Rather
there has been a combination of trends with decentralisation in and around individual
towns and cities coupled with increasing concentration at relatively few places within
regions. Locally however the scattering of employment development, often unrelated
to traditional centres or public transport nodes, has left a legacy of car-dominated
commuting which is extremely difficult to counter.
Evidence of office development completions in England and Wales between 1995
and 2003 indicates that these are now highly clustered regionally and sub-regionally
(WSP and Arup 2005). Most development has taken place in London and in about half
a dozen major cities including Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham at the centres of their
respective conurbations (although not necessarily in the centres of the cities themselves).
Remoter freestanding cities such as Plymouth, Norwich and Hull, although they are
important sub-regional centres, have seen very little such development. Meanwhile
there has been significant growth in certain motorway corridors outside, but linked to,
major cities - in the M11 and M3/M4 corridors to the north and west of London, in the
M42 corridor to the east of Birmingham and the M6 west of Manchester. Significantly
all of these have good access to international airports.
Similar trends are evident in the pattern of retail development although the degree
of concentration regionally is less pronounced. Over the last decade or so there has