Vision-based planning

Darren Kirkman is Associate Director of Strategy, Funding and Appraisal at SYSTRA UK and Ireland. He has helped many authorities throughout the UK develop successful funding bids for transport infrastructure. In the first of our series of articles on transport planning, Darren explains why it is essential to firstly establish a clear vision for the future of your area and the role of the transport network in achieving that vision.

The transport networks we build shape the way we live and how we live in them, but for a long time we have worked on the opposite assumption: that transport simply supplies the needs dictated by our style of life. This mistake has led us to a world that is becoming increasingly dominated by the car and the highways that support it; a world doubly choked by congestion and pollutants. It is an unsustainable world. If we are going to find our way to a better one, a healthier, happier one, the old ‘predict and provide’ approach that set the vicious circle of car dependency spinning must be replaced with an entirely different approach.

That approach is vision-based planning. Instead of simply estimating demand growth based on use forecasts, planners and their clients start by asking a fundamentally different question: not ‘where are we going?’ but ‘where do we want to get to?’

In vision-based planning, an agreed idea of a desired future becomes the first step in the planning process. It means thinking deeply about how to break the tyranny of the private car, liberating populations by bringing them closer to their social and commercial needs, giving them greater control of their lives and transport choices while protecting their health and the health of the natural environment around them. Only then do we consider how to build the infrastructure that can make that vision a reality.

Visions aren’t easy, of course, and can sometimes be deceptive. There is a danger that we exchange one set of false assumptions for another. That is why meaningful stakeholder engagement is so important and forms the bedrock of SYSTRA’s vision-led planning, such as the extensive work in Glasgow City Centre where, as one example among many, SYSTRA developed and tested ways of improving walkability based on the real needs of various local populations. Vision does not mean foisting an unwelcome ideology on a begrudging local community as some of the campaigns against 15-minute cities and similar recent developments might want us to believe. It is not a conspiracy to remove the freedom and fun of the car in service to a grimly utilitarian environmentalist doctrine, but the opposite. It is about responding to desires and needs in people that have been consistently frustrated by decades of path-dependency in post-war planning that simply assumed that an ever-more automated and atomised social world connected by roads and cars was the inevitable destination of modernity.

None of this assumes that the future is stable or completely knowable. Building in resilience to uncertainty is always going to be a part of any vision. If Covid taught us anything, it is that a lot of unknowns remain stubbornly unknown, and that is why it’s necessary to establish that any strategy is robust in a range of future scenarios, something we achieved for Transport Scotland’s National Transport Strategy (NTS2) with our pioneering Scenario Planning Tool. But one thing about the future is certain: it can’t just be a continuation of the present if the world is going to survive. Nature is telling us it is time to change. Human nature too. We can create the vision today that will make sure that change is a positive one tomorrow.

SYSTRA is offering a free facilitated workshop session to help any local authority understand what they need to do to develop their next transport strategy, irrespective of where they are in the process. To discuss this, please get in touch with Darren Kirkman at [email protected].

• News

18 March 2024

Darren Kirkman appointed to Transport Planning Society Board

Darren Kirkman, Associate Director Transport Strategy, Funding and Appraisal at SYSTRA, has been appointed to the Board of the Transport Planning Society.

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