Transport Planning Day 2024

Overview

The road less travelled: the principles, policies, practicalities and politics of reducing car use

Every year, the Transport Planning Society celebrates ‘Transport Planning Day’ to raise the profile of transport planning and the role it has in changing the places we live and increasing the quality of people’s lives. We also use the opportunity to celebrate transport planners and to showcase best practice from across the profession. 

This year we want to focus the campaign on reducing car use in the UK.

Governments across the UK have expressed the need to reduce car use to reach Net Zero and tackle the wider impacts of a continuing growth in road traffic, including congestion, road casualties, community severance and local air pollution. The Scottish Government have set the objective to reduce car kilometres travelled by 20% by 2030.  In Wales, the Government’s 2021 Net-Zero Wales Carbon Budget 2 report set out the target of a 10% reduction in car miles by 2030.  And in London, the Mayor announced in 2022 plans to reduce the total distance driven by cars in the city by 27% when compared to 2018 levels. 

Meanwhile, the UK Government has said in its response to the Transport Select Committee report on the National Networks National Policy Statement (NNNPS) that the “government’s approach to decarbonisation is not to stop people travelling, it is about enabling people to do the same things differently and more sustainably while still realising transport’s social and economic benefits”. 

Local efforts to reduce car use across UK towns and cities have been met with opposition and triggered an increasingly polarised debate about “anti-car” measures. Some of this opposition stems from a belief that local traffic management schemes have been poorly designed or introduced with inadequate consultation. 

But there are more fundamental objections too, based on a belief that seeking to reduce car travel is an assault on freedom of choice – even though a significant minority of the population do not have access to a car. There are also concerns about the lack of meaningful alternatives to car travel due to the rising cost of public transport, increasingly unreliable public transport networks, and inconvenient, disjointed multi-modal journeys. This is especially true for more rural areas where long distances and a lack of local access to goods and services density make it harder to move away from car-dependency. 

This year’s Transport Planning Day programme will unpack the hotly contested issue of reducing car travel. Is it necessary if we want to decarbonise the UK’s transport system?  What policies would need to be implemented to deliver it?  What practical changes would need to be made to the UK’s transport system? And what are the political implications of delivering a reduction in vehicle kms? 
 

Programme