Transportation planning
As practiced today, it is a collaborative process that incorporates the input of many stakeholders including various government agencies, the public and private businesses.
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 contemporary Smeed Report on congestion pricing was initially promoted to manage demand but was deemed politically unacceptable.
It was estimated in 2003 that 2,000 new planners would be required by 2010 to avoid jeopardizing the success of the Transport Ten Year Plan.
[8] Transportation planning in the United States is in the midst of a shift similar to that taking place in the United Kingdom, away from the single goal of moving vehicular traffic and towards an approach that takes into consideration the communities and lands through which streets, roads, and highways pass ("the context").
This new approach, known as Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS), seeks to balance the need to move people efficiently and safely with other desirable outcomes, including historic preservation, environmental sustainability, and the creation of vital public spaces.
The initial guiding principles of CSS came out of the 1998 "Thinking Beyond the Pavement" conference[9] as a means to describe and foster transportation projects that preserve and enhance the natural and built environments, as well as the economic and social assets of the neighborhoods they pass through.
[10] Also, in 2003, the Federal Highway Administration announced that under one of its three Vital Few Objectives (Environmental Stewardship and Streamlining) they set the target of achieving CSS integration within all state Departments of Transportation by September 2007.
The model views planning as a logical and technical process that uses the analysis of quantitative data to decide how to best invest resources in new and existing transport infrastructure.
[14] The US process, according to Johnston (2004) and the FHWA and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) (2007), generally follows a pattern which can be divided into three different stages.
During this phase the MPO also collects data on wide variety of regional characteristics, develops a set of different alternatives that will be explored as part of the planning process and creates a list of measurable outcomes that will be used to see whether goals and objectives have been achieved.
Johnston notes that many MPOs perform weakly in this area, and though many of these activities seem like the "soft" aspects of planning that are not really necessary, they are absolutely essential to ensuring that the models used in second phase are accurate and complete .
[14] The actual analysis tool used in the US is called the Urban Transportation Modeling System (UTMS), though it is often referred to as the four-step process.
This results in models which may estimate future traffic conditions well, but are ultimately based on assumptions made on the part of the planner.
Transportation planners help by providing information to decision makers, such as politicians, in a manner that produces beneficial outcomes.
