The evolution of transport policy and planning - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 61

Part II
The evolution of transport
policy and planning
The problems and opportunities which confront today's transport planners are not
simply the product of the social and economic changes described in Part 1. They also
reflect the decisions which national and local governments have taken in the past to
influence these changes or to modify their outcomes.
In a developed country like Britain the 'resource' represented by our transport
inheritance - physical, institutional and cultural - is enormous. Although this provides
us with an immense advantage (in that we are not starting from scratch) it is also
something of an obstacle. For practical reasons and in terms of winning public support
the activities of present governments are inevitably concerned with making what are
mostly marginal adjustments to the sum of what has been done in the past (although
such measures will obviously be carefully targeted).
Here in Part 2 we consider the main policy measures which have been taken in the
past, the results of which combine to form the setting for planning today. This inherited
policy framework, it should be emphasised, is not the product of some coherent overall
design. Rather it is better viewed as a patchwork quilt which has and continues to
be worked on, with new pieces being added on some occasions, and old ones being
renovated or replaced on others. The source of some of the pieces is very old indeed,
much older than the last 50 years on which we concentrated in Part 1.
The evolution of transport policy is presented in broadly chronological order
organised around particular initiatives or types of action characteristic of their time.
• Chapter 4 considers the period before 1955 during which some of the fundamental
decisions were taken towards the treatment of the motor car and its impacts, but
before the age of mass motorisation.
• Chapter 5 describes the events of the next 25 years (here labelled 'the motorway
age') which were dominated by initiatives designed to address the requirements
of this new era.
• Chapter 6 recounts the changes introduced by the post-1979 Conservative
Government led by Margaret Thatcher and which, as in many other spheres,
marked a radical departure from the political consensus which characterised the
earlier post-war period.
• Chapter 7 deals with policy changes in the 1990s which reflected the arrival of
'sustainable development' on the political agenda and with challenges to the
convention of 'predict and provide' in transport planning.
• Chapter 8 extends this into the period of the New Labour Government between
1997 and 2004 marked by the rise and fall of the aspirations set out initially in its
'New Deal' White Paper.