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The UK has a long tradition of local transport plans as a means of articulating and implementing transport strategy. That approach is now being emulated by the European Commission. This paper assesses the appropriateness of past and current practice in England outside London as a basis for application more widely in Europe, and advocates improvements in the ways in which guidance might be provided to local authority staff. It draws on the international literature to identify the requirements for effective local transport plans. In particular it outlines the evidence on the policy instruments which are likely to be most effective, identifies the barriers to implementing them and summarises the development of decision-support tools which could help to overcome these barriers. It then reviews, on the basis of the literature and personal experience, the development of transport policies and programmes and local transport plans in England. Combining these two analyses, it assesses the effectiveness of these procedures for local transport planning in England, and recommends improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There is now an increased understanding of the need to design urban transport and land-use systems to be more sustainable, and of the policies which are needed to achieve this. However, work by the European Conference of Ministers of Transport has highlighted the institutional, acceptability, financial, information, regulatory and process barriers to implementing them. These barriers are evident in the UK, even though it has a particularly developed approach to local transport planning. As a contribution to overcoming them, a 4-year research programme has been conducted to develop decision-support tools for local government. The paper describes the international background to this research programme, its objectives and overall structure and its interaction with local authorities. The barriers to sustainability identified by the programme''s local authority partners are presented, the development of the selected products from the research programme is outlined and the challenges in transferring them into practice are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The concept of integrated urban land-use and transport strategies has been promoted for more than a decade. In most cases, strategy appraisal is conducted by maximizing some measure of total welfare based on a cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In other cases, a multicriteria approach is adopted whereby monetized and nonmonetized effects are taken together. More recently, there has been a move toward the use of targets at both national and local levels first for monitoring purposes but also for the appraisal of strategies against outcomes. The aim of this paper is to present optimal transport strategies resulting from the application of different appraisal frameworks. We apply and compare a standard CBA appraisal and a target-based approach. We also look at constrained optimization solutions, adding constraints on finance, CO2 emissions, and cost of accidents to the CBA approach. The results are presented and discussed for two UK cities: Edinburgh and Leeds. This research configuration allows us to identify and explain similarities and differences in the optimal strategies and to decide whether they stem from the application of the different appraisal methods or if they are city specific. Our results indicate that there is a discrepancy between the targets set and the monetary values used in the CBA approach. When constrained to meet certain targets, the impact on policy can be significant; in the extreme case, it can reverse the policy for capacity increases. The constrained CBA approach can find solutions that maximize welfare while satisfying the targets, but this still leaves open the issue of whether targets and monetary values can be set that are consistent with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe local government decisionmaking in transport in three areas of the United Kingdom—London, West Yorkshire, and Edinburgh—in which major changes in local government decisionmaking structures have taken place over the last decade, and between which arrangements are now very different. They discuss whether institutional change has had a beneficial or adverse effect, and whether any of the current structures provides a more effective framework for policy development and implementation. The results suggest that, although the sites share a broadly common set of objectives, there are differences in devolved responsibilities and in the extent to which various policy options are within the control of the bodies charged with transport policy delivery. The existence of several tiers of government, coupled with the many interactions required between these public sector bodies and the predominantly private sector public transport operators, appears to create extra transactional barriers and impedes the implementation of the most effective measures for cutting congestion. There is, however, a compelling argument for the presence of an overarching tier of government to organise travel over a spatial scale compatible with that of major commuter patterns. The extent to which such arrangements currently appear to work is a function of the range of powers and the funding levels afforded to the coordinating organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]