Planning Sustainable Transport

Barry Hutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136754159
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Transport choices must be transformed if we are to cope with sustainability and climate change, but this can only be done if we understand how complex transport systems work. Straightforward choices are never made between one transport mode and another; door-to-door movements of both people and freight use combinations of different modes of transport.

This book offers a cross-disciplinary overview of transport systems and the ways in which they interact with urban and regional planning decisions and environmental issues. It offers a thoughtful critique of existing methodology and policy, raising issues, providing facts, explaining linkages and, particularly, stimulating debate. The book methodically explores the definitions, trends, problems, objectives and policies of transport planning. In particular the author looks at land use as a major determinant of the nature and extent of the demand for transport, concluding that the management of land use has to be a key element of any sustainable transport policy.

Planning Sustainable Transport will be essential reading for today's transport specialists, planners and property developers. It will also be useful to postgraduate students in planning and related disciplines.

Chapter 1

The definitions

Sustainability

The Brundtland Report

The Brundtland Report (1987) defined sustainability as:

Ensuring that development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.¹

This definition implied a continuous process rather than an event or a quality. It acknowledged the need to use the earth’s resources to meet the basic human needs of shelter, food and warmth for an increasing number of people. Brundtland did not suggest a reversion to a primitive life to ensure that the inventory of the earth’s resources is left more or less as we find it but it did urge that the minimum impact should be made upon the resource stock. The Report emphasised four sustainable policies to ensure that the needs of future populations are not compromised:

1. Resources are used efficiently to minimise the depletion of finite resources.
2. Any wastes are disposed of with minimal damage to the environment so that the continuing natural renewal of the resource base is unimpeded.
3. The growth in world population is slowed.
4. ‘Development’ is spread more evenly around the global population.

‘Development’ in this context means expanding global production, partly to even out standards of living across the world, and partly to satisfy the needs of an expected increase in global population. This expansion of production may only be achieved by more factories consuming more raw materials, backed by more offices, shops and transport, trends which Brundtland accepts as unavoidable but which should be kept to a minimum. This implies that damage must be recognised and quantified; otherwise its management and minimisation would be impossible.

The Brundtland Report did not hide the fact that some ‘painful choices’ would have to be made. Massive, unsustainable increases in production and consumption would be needed if the inequalities between the developed and the developing world were to be removed by bringing global consumption per head up to the levels now enjoyed by highly developed countries. Consequently, one plank of the sustainable policy suggested by Brundtland must be to ensure that current standards of living are spread more evenly. The Report argued that if this were not done, countries with lower living standards would strive to raise them by copying the economies of the richer countries, forcing up prices of energy and raw materials and then raising their consumption to unsustainable levels. It is arguable that this assertion, now a quarter of a century old, is becoming true. China, striving to emulate the West, is consuming more energy and raw materials, forcing global prices up and tending to create the very unsustainability feared by Brundtland.

Brundtland stressed that sustainability is more complex than a focus upon the reduction of pollution or even avoiding excessive environmental damage, intricate though these problems may be. If the headlong increase in the use of raw materials and energy is to be slowed, then existing production must be spread more evenly: that may well be seen to be a moral issue – an injustice – with some societies hogging more than their ‘share’ while others strive to keep pace. But Brundtland argues that it is more than a moral argument – it is in the interests of the richer nations to curtail their consumption in order to damp down the aspirations of poorer countries and so slow the rate of exploitation of the finite global resources. The ‘painful choices’ to which Brundtland draws attention are therefore painful to those who may have to forgo continuing increases in their standards of living but they are also painful to political leaders who have to run the risk of being pilloried and then rejected for placing the interests of the planet above the immediate interests of their own electorate.

This conflict between the long-term interests of future generations all over the world and the short-term interests of the existing inhabitants of the richer countries is, perhaps, the core problem facing us and it is important to recognise that it is not a problem of science or technology but of politics, attitudes and aspirations.

The Rio Conference

The Brundtland Report was published in 1987 under the auspices of the United Nations and, after a gap of three years to enable each national government to establish a response, the UN organised a summit conference in Rio de Janeiro to address sustainability. The product was ‘Agenda 21’, an international protocol defining global sustainable policy. Although few dared to say so, the problems and policies outlined in Brundtland required a global response but global political cooperation was not up to the challenge and, although Agenda 21 was the product of an unprecedented international conference, and although many nations signed up to the protocol, implementation was left to individual countries. Agenda 21 was recognised more in posture rather than in practice.

At the Rio Conference the international community made the problem of sustainability more tractable by shifting the emphasis away from the broad problems of poverty and the global disparities in standards of living, towards the issue of climate change. In effect it redefined ‘sustainability’, abandoning the broad Brundtland meaning, and concentrating on pollution, greenhouse gases and climate change. Clearly, this is a very important global problem and is one element of sustainability as defined by Brundtland, but climate change is much less politically sensitive than moving wealth from the advantaged to the disadvantaged.

The British government responded to Agenda 21 with Sustainable Development: The UK Strategy (1994).² The report was the first sign that the British government were more conscious of the immediate political dangers of reining in growth than of the long-term problems of sustainability. The Foreword, written by John Major, the then Prime Minister, made it very clear that the intention was to attempt to be all things to all men:

150 states committed themselves at the Rio conference to make future development sustainable – not to turn their backs on growth – but to ensure that the price of growth did not become an intolerable bill for future generations.

This was to become a common theme that actions to promote sustainability and climate change need not restrict growth, a theme reiterated by successive governments and articulated and expanded at length 12 years later in Stern’s ‘Review of the Economics of Climate Change’ – not, it will be noticed, the ‘Economics of Sustainability’ but ‘Climate Change’: by 2006, ‘sustainability’ had been politically morphed into ‘climate change’.

John Major’s Foreword carried another message that was to repeat itself:

The Agenda 21 was not just for government but for business, for organisations and for individual men and women.

A flag that the government intended to lead from the back, responding to public concern rather than setting a clear agenda for itself.

The Minister for the Environment, John Gummer, wrote an introduction with a completely different tone and intent, pointing out:

that man lived on earth as a conqueror, dominating, controlling and exploiting the natural environment and that this could not go on without irretrievable damage since effects we could ignore when they were confined to the actions of a few, became intolerable when they were spread more and more widely.

He was also at pains to point out the effectiveness of the Clean Air Act (1956), hinting at the distinction between this decisive and effective legislation, an example of a government governing rather than establishing a camouflage net of committees and advisory groups.

Sustainable Development: The UK Strategy provoked a cloud of objectives and policies. Those for development were concerned in the main with satisfying the demand for new housing:

• promote attractive and convenient extensions to urban areas;
• in locations which minimise energy consumption;
• encourage brownland development;
• sustain the rural environment;
• engage developers.

And those for transport:

• influence the rate of traffic growth;
• provide a framework for individual choice in transport which enables environmental objectives to be met;
• increase the economic efficiency of transport decisions;
• improve vehicle design to minimise harmful emissions.

In the UK, as in many other countries, Agenda 21 appeared as ‘Local Agenda 21’ (LA21) to be set and implemented by local councils adopting the above targets rather than by national legislation. Devising LA21 policies was encouraged and supervised by the Sustainable Development Commission, a company limited by guarantee and effectively a wholly owned, arm’s-length subsidiary agency of the British government. Although no doubt the Sustainable Development Commission would object to the suggestion that their arm’s-length agency status was a way of taking sustainability out of the direct responsibility of Her Majesty’s Government, there can be no doubt that it removed sustainability from the list of front-line political issues. The detachment of the Sustainable Development Commission from government was completed on 31 March 2011 when it was abolished, the related website dismantled and the documentation buried in the national archive.

In Britain the focus on pollution was emphasised by a second document published in 1994, this one by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.³ (The current political urgency of sustainability is indicated by the abolition of the Royal Commission on 1 April 2011, 24 hours after the Sustainable Development Commission was disbanded.) The objectives set by the Commission were to:

• ensure that an effective transport policy at all levels of government is integrated with land-use policy and gives priority to minimising the need for transport and increasing the proportion of trips made by environmentally less damaging modes;
• achieve standards of air quality that will prevent damage to human health and the environment;
• improve the quality of life, particularly in towns and cities, by reducing the dominance of cars and lorries and providing alternative means of access;
• increase the proportions of personal travel and freight transport by environmentally less damaging modes and to make best use of existing infrastructure;
• halt any loss of land to transport infrastructure in areas of conservation, cultural, scenic or amenity value unless the use of the land for that purpose has been shown to be the best practicable environmental option;
• reduce carbon dioxide emissions from transport;
• reduce substantially the demands which transport infrastructure and the vehicle industry place on non-renewable materials;
• reduce noise nuisance from transport.

In line with this general policy, LA21 set these explicit objectives for local councils:

• reducing fuel consumption;
• reducing the use of other finite resources;
• reducing the irreversible change in climate due to the emission of greenhouse gases;
• reducing other pollutions which cause long-term, irreversible damage;
• reducing the risks of damage to human health and quality of life;
• reducing the impacts upon natural and semi-natural habitats and upon areas of cultural and amenity value;
• promoting land-use patterns which depend for their viability on transport systems which will have one or more of the above effects.

Both of these lists, although ambitious, concentrated upon aims that may be delivered locally or nationally; they are local components of the global issue and much less politically contentious than dealing with global disparities in standards of living. That is not to say the lists were devoid of contention: today there is considerable scepticism about the nature, causes and relevance of climate change and about the impacts of policies designed to deal with them. Local councils lost their enthusiasm for LA21 policies, although many retained their concerns with rubbish, landfill and recycling: Brundtland had been diluted to less contentious, although still undeniably important issues. Despite sustainability and climate change being phased out of mainstream political concern, the issue is still an important one: Brundtland’s stance is still appropriate and all the subsequent words, policies and postures, although now in the background, still have validity. Much of the content of this book is focused on just how the above two lists of objectives, taken directly from the Report on Transport and the Environment published by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, might be delivered.

The Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol⁴ was signed in December 1997 and was to come into force in February 2005. Although ambitious, it confirmed the selection of climate change as a more tractable abstraction from the broader concerns of Brundtland and of the Rio Protocol. It also relied on the principles of market forces, perhaps because price mechanisms were seen to be the best or even the only way of delivering global policy. Even then, it was ratified by only 37 countries and so was both narrower by subject and weaker in political drive than the Rio Protocol.

The Protocol was concerned with ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG), those gases which are thought to cause global warming by preventing some of the energy received fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• 1. The definitions: sustainability
• 2. The definitions: transport
• 3. The definitions: planning
• 4. The trends: travel and haulage
• 5. Fuel consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG)
• 6. Location and land use
• 7. The problems: congestion
• 8. The problems: interchanging and trans-shipment
• 9. The problems: the space budget
• 10. Transport costs
• 11. Sensing success and failure
• 12. Managing the environmental impacts
• 13. Mobility and accessibility
• 14. Controlling costs
• 15. Supporting the economy
• 16. Road vehicle design
• 17. Public transport
• 18. Tolls, taxes and tariffs: fares, fines and fees
• 19. Transport demand prediction
• 20. The need for a new methodology to estimate travel demand
• 21. Planning sustainable transport: the agenda
• Bibliography
• Index