[This content first appeared on LinkedIn on 6 November 2024]
Yowza! How apropos a question raised in my previous post seems to have been! Namely: Why are we still approving development with substandard access to public transport?
Well, lo and behold, Peter Walker of the Guardian, no less, has attempted to answer that question by publishing an article on how “Planning rules have failed to link new homes to public transport.”
It turns out that a study by the RTPI has found that the last ten years of constant chatter about building in sustainable locations with good transport infrastructure has literally fallen on deaf ears.
There are a number of repercussions to this that anyone who’s been placemaking for over half an hour and has a duty of care to the public will understand:
- People have to become car dependent out of necessity
- This has implications for people’s health…
- … as well as their finances
- It disadvantages those on low incomes
- It disadvantages those who for whatever reason cannot drive, or do not want to drive
- It makes access to shops, schools, colleges, workplaces, doctors’ surgeries etc. etc. etc. an arduous task in what is apparently a civilised society with sufficient GDP to send us straight in at No6 in the Top Ten countdown of global economies
Not a good look.
This week my Urban Design 101 request is a return to strategic level design, reviewing the morphology of existing settlements well served by public transport to investigate how these could be sustainably expanded to accommodate housing need.
It’s quite clear that the current system of the ‘call for sites’, where land comes forward in an often delightfully ad-hoc manner, often in fields with questionable topography and drainage issues, often far from anywhere and which would just result in yet more car dependency… *checks notes*… isn’t working.
I’m not the only one to reach this conclusion – take a look at ‘Achieving Good Town Form’, the latest Urban Design Group paper.
If we are going to design inclusively – which includes providing the community with a viable choice of travel options – we have to get the public transport links right.
A few miles up the road a still-under-construction major, major housing development has had to abandon a bus route through the site because the streets in the neighbouring development parcel weren’t wide enough to accommodate it. But all is not lost! Residents can still walk a quarter of a mile alongside a dual-carriageway on a path that isn’t overlooked to a stop that is barely overlooked by a single house to catch a bus into town.
And on the way home again, they have the pleasure of crossing that dual-carriageway via staggered crossings.
Not much of a selling point even while the fare is still capped at £2.
Phones and keys at the ready, ladies!
Amirite?
#peterwalker #guardian #amirite #placemaking #placemakers #urbandesign #publictransport #bus
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