Transport Impacts on Land Use: Towards A Practical Understanding for Urban Policy Making – Introduction and Research Plan.

INTRODUCTION

This working paper forms a general introduction to an EPSRC CASE research project, presenting the objectives of the research, the rationale behind the study, a summary of some of the results obtained so far, and a plan for the remainder of the research work. The project is due for completion in November 1996.

In other words, the project is examining:

1. The current understanding of the nature of the influence that transport has upon activity patterns and land use. Specifically, this is making use of empirical studies of transport impacts on land use, plus behavioural studies of the factors in location choice.

2. Whether this relationship can be adequately represented in a predictive context. This consists of two elements. How the relationship of transport on land use can be studied and 'formalised', and secondly, the ability to use this relationship for estimation of land use response to transport impacts. Use will be made of published modelling studies, plus some original modelling work, using a model constructed for this research.

3. The benefits of predicting transport impacts upon land use to planners involved in strategic land use and transport planning. This is the main objective of the research, and addresses why transport impacts on land use appear to have a minor role in structure planning, why model representations are seldom used, and given a model's predictions, what use will be made of the model results. Initial results from the first round of interviews are given in this paper.

There are several themes that underpin this research:

The nature of the 'transport on land use' relationship.

How far it can he formalised, what we know about it, and how it is best to study it.

Strategic planning processes in the UK, how the planning system handles the transport on land use relationship, under what circumstances the relationship is important, and the role of model predictions in the planning process.

Whether the remit of 'planning' should examine transport impacts on land use, plus anticipation of the impacts of local government reorganisation.

The issue of whether predictive modellmg in this context is an appropriate tool beyond the scope of academic research.