Transportation planning

Transportation planning is the process of defining future policies, goals, investments, and designs to prepare for future needs to move people and goods to destinations. As practiced today, it is a collaborative process that incorporates the input of many stakeholders including various government agencies, the public and private businesses. Transportation planners apply a multi-modal and/or comprehensive approach to analyzing the wide range of alternatives and impacts on the transportation system to influence beneficial outcomes. Transportation planning is also commonly referred to as transport planning internationally, and is involved with the evaluation, assessment, design, and siting of transport facilities (generally streets, highways, bike lanes, and public transport lines). Transportation planning, or transport planning, has historically followed the rational planning model of defining goals and objectives, identifying problems, generating alternatives, evaluating alternatives, and developing plans. Other models for planning include rational actor, transit oriented development, satisficing, incremental planning, organizational process, collaborative planning, and political bargaining. Planners are increasingly expected to adopt a multidisciplinary approach, especially due to the rising importance of environmentalism. For example, the use of behavioural psychology to persuade drivers to abandon their automobiles and use public transport instead. The role of the transport planner is shifting from technical analysis to promoting sustainability through integrated transport policies. For example, in Hanoi, the increasing number of motorcycles is responsible for not only environmental damage but also slowing down economic growth. In the long run, the plan is to reduce traffic through a change in urban planning. Through economic incentives and attractive alternatives experts hope to lighten traffic in the short run. In the United Kingdom, transport planning has traditionally been a branch of civil engineering. In the 1950s and the 1960s, it was generally believed that the motor car was an important element in the future of transport as economic growth spurred on car ownership figures. The role of the transport planner was to match motorway and rural road capacity against the demands of economic growth. Urban areas would need to be redesigned for the motor vehicle or impose traffic containment and demand management to mitigate congestion and environmental impacts. The policies were popularised in a 1963 government publication, Traffic in Towns. The contemporary Smeed Report on congestion pricing was initially promoted to manage demand but was deemed politically unacceptable. In more recent times, the approach has been caricatured as 'predict and provide' to predict future transport demand and provide the network for it, usually by building more roads. The publication of Planning Policy Guidance 13 in 1994 (revised in 2001), followed by A New Deal for Transport in 1998 and the white paper Transport Ten Year Plan 2000 again indicated an acceptance that unrestrained growth in road traffic was neither desirable nor feasible. The worries were threefold: concerns about congestion, concerns about the effect of road traffic on the environment (both natural and built) and concerns that an emphasis on road transport discriminates against vulnerable groups in society such as the poor, the elderly and the disabled.