Let’s teach joined-up thinking to break the transport and planning silos

IF YOU ARE at a transport conference and find your attention is wavering, you might care to try a game of silent bingo. This involves listening out for some of the tropes that appear with reliable frequency in the speeches of presenters. “X per cent of journeys are under Y km and so could readily be cycled” is a personal favourite. “Transport now represents the largest share of our greenhouse gas emissions” is another good one.

But the best, and probably the longest-running, trope is “transport and land-use planning need to be more integrated”.

Now, we need to understand that transport conferences are in large part a form of therapy for generally well-intentioned people who struggle with the reality of their working world.

So we shouldn’t criticise speakers for repeating things that are already well understood. It’s a way of trying to remain grounded when, for example, airport expansion is back on the agenda despite the overwhelming case against it. The equivalent of saying “there is no monster in the wardrobe” as the wardrobe’s door rattles ominously. Transport conferences are our safe space. There should be more hugging at transport conferences.

With respect to the disjuncture between land-use and transport planning, we can excuse an exceptionally high level of frustration and, thus, the frequency with which it is mentioned.

For, in contrast with airport expansion, where there are at least arguments (however specious) in favour, there is surely no one of sound mind who would argue that integrating land-use and transport planning would be a bad thing, upsetting the natural order of things, and bringing great damage to people’s lives.

I was in Madrid in the late 1990s, studying the planning practices of the Consorcio de Transportes, that city’s equivalent to TfL. “What’s that you’re doing?” I asked my host. “We’re planning a metro line to fit in with housing developments,” he answered. I was struck that he was excited about what was clearly a rare opportunity.

It wasn’t always thus, I reflected: London’s outer suburban Metro-land expansion into the Chiltern Hills was sufficiently well-planned and executed that it became an iconic brand, and was later celebrated by the Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman amongst many others, as the essence of Englishness.

More recently, transit-oriented development (first exported from here to north America, then reimported to Europe) has become the planning approach of choice, and there are good examples to enjoy, such as Meridian Water, Enfield council’s major regeneration project next door to the Lee Valley Regional Park, with its own upgraded railway station. But these are the exceptions, as any report by Transport for New Homes will tell you.

This isn’t the place to hold forth on the reasons for the lack of integration. Suffice to say it’s easier when the public sector is in charge of both transport and new development. But, with no prospect of that, the question is what we can do about the world we find ourselves in.

One answer may lie in governance. Many will remember the short-lived attempt to achieve integration at the highest level, with the creation of ‘superministries’ under former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions was mockingly nicknamed the Department of Everything, and didn’t last. Its successor, DTLR, shorn of the Environment, was not so easily derided, but fared little better. At local government level there was a period of having Directors of Planning and Transport, but that also seems to have passed.

As the course leader of University of Westminster’s MSc in Transport Planning, I’m obliged to ask whether the higher-education community could be making a bigger contribution.

We, ourselves, have a module, Land Use Planning and Transport, which covers the interaction between transport and land-use, including the effect of land-use on travel patterns and the contribution of transport to development. Topics explored include the transport and land use feedback cycle, framework of laws and regulations of land use planning, land use strategies to promote sustainable mobility, principles of LUTI modelling, sustainable accessibility planning, and perspectives on planning major transport infrastructure.

This is not an exhaustive list of what can be considered to explore these important interactions between land use planning and transport, but it is interesting that this module consistently draws large numbers of students from both our transport and planning courses.

This surely tells us that there are people on both sides of the (virtual) fence who at least want to see how the other half lives. And it would be remiss not to mention the existing MSc courses that explicitly straddle that fence, at Hertfordshire, Manchester and UCL, with titles including some combination of transport and urban/city/sustainable planning.

A glance at their curricula suggests that they aggregate planning modules and transport modules. No bad thing, for sure, but will that solve the problem? These courses remain the exception, meanwhile: most people still opt for either a transport or a planning course.

Perhaps that’s because this is what the market offers them. Which came first: siloed disciplines or siloed practice? Perhaps it’s because the two things that we so need to be integrated remain fundamentally quite different.

For example, transport planning is, generally, about things that move, whilst land-use planning deals with things that, generally, stay put. Banal, but true. I, for one, am very much more interested in the former than the latter, and that’s probably not remarkable: transport planners are seemingly from Mars whilst spatial planners are from Venus? Thus, for as long as we educators offer our students only an opportunity to peek over the fence, as part of studying either one or the other, that may be as much interaction as they want.

Put another way, if people aren’t choosing to become integrated transport/land-use practitioners of their own accord, perhaps we need to forge a new discipline, to provide them with a path. What might this look like?

Well, the titles of the courses might be quite similar to those already in existence: Transport and Urban/City Planning, say. (We can leave the vexed question of name order to our marketing colleagues.)

Perhaps the modules ‘under the hood’ would need to look different, though: each would have a title referring to both transport and spatial planning, not one or the other. This might help to tackle a tendency for planning education to treat transport as a fixed point and vice versa.

Who would take such a course? Well, those currently choosing the existing hybrid programmes are obvious candidates. Would we need to close the individual ‘pure’ transport and planning courses to achieve the integration we seek? I think this would be a bad thing, as we shall continue to need at least some specialists.

What, then, will happen to these new ‘integrated’ people when they graduate? The parallel tension between engineering and design (and architecture) may be a useful reference point: the majority of practitioners are decidedly one or the other, but there are a few who have managed to straddle the traditional disciplinary boundaries and are in high demand as a result, not only for their usefully broad view, but partly because they can mediate when the two tribes go to war.

So I am not so much throwing down a gauntlet as placing it gently on the floor. It will be interesting to see whether my colleagues in other universities support the idea. But suppose we in higher education started producing truly integrated land-use and transport planners. What might the policy/practice world do in response?

Would they tailor the practical roles they offer to suit these new ambidextrous recruits, and help them flourish? Or make them ‘specialise’ to fit the traditional sets of organisational functionalities or fee-earning posts within their existing structures?

I leave that question for a further contributor from the employer world.

Tom Cohen is Reader in Transport Policy at the University of Westminster and a member of its Active Travel Academy. He is course leader of Westminster’s MSc in Transport Planning and editor of the open-access journal Active Travel Studies. His principal research interests are transport justice and enhancing transport decision making.

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT910, 5 March 2025.