The Methodological Guidebook is aimed at practitioners. It presents a coherent but flexible general approach to planning for a sustainable urban land use/transport system. To be useful in a variety of circumstances, it offers a choice of methods and approaches, all compatible with general rules of good planning and with the overarching sustainability objective. Particular emphasis, however, is on a new logical method of appraising land use/transport strategies with respect to sustainability, and on optimising with respect to sustainability.

The aim was to demonstrate “how best to formulate land use/transport strategies”. City authorities have available to them an increasing range of policy measures to address these problems, including infrastructure provision; management measures; information systems; pricing; and land use policies. There is an increased emphasis on the integrated use of these measures in order to achieve synergy between them. However, it is often difficult to identify that combination of measures which will achieve the optimal strategy for a particular city.

The research project consists of a literature study, consultation with over 50 European cities and modelling exercises to test the suggested methodology.

The overall message that can be distilled from the Methodological Guidebook is that there are indeed numerous ways of improving the analytical parts of the process of planning for sustainability. These methods are useful regardless of whether the city adopts the plan-led, consensus-led or vision-led approach to planning, or some combination of these.

Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds
United Kingdom
http://www.its.leeds.ac.uk
Tony May, tel. +44 1132336610

15/01/2005

Harald Minken et al.

research

Urban Policy > Transport and infrastructure

Public transport, Roads and road transport