Transport Planning Day 2024 

Transport Planning Day is led by the Transport Planning Society to celebrate the best in transport planning, highlight its benefit to communities and chart a direction for the profession.

Every year we choose a specific theme for the campaign to focus on a different topic or issue within the Transport Planning profession.

Transport Planning has never been more important

– Gavin Newlands MP, Transport Planning Day 2020 Virtual Parliamentary Reception

The campaign includes several events which allows transport planners to network and promote their achievements.
The campaign also looks to encourage young professionals into the industry by highlighting what an attractive and rewarding career transport planning can be.

I joined Transport Planning Day 2020 to understand where transport planning is heading as an industry

– 2020 Audience Survey.

Date and Theme

This year's Transport Planning Day campaign will take place on Monday 11th November at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London and Online.

The theme for 2024’s Transport Planning Day is ‘The Road Less Travelled: the Principles, Policies, Practicalities and Politics of Reducing Car Use in the UK’. During a climate emergency, reducing car use has become central to debates around reducing emissions and reaching Net Zero.

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? 

Supporting events

Every year the society runs a series of pre-Transport Planning Day supporting events, more information about further dates and topics of these to follow soon! 

• May 2nd: Lecture by Leo Murray - Reducing Traffic – what is Possible?  A campaigner’s perspective on achieving modal shift and reducing road mileage.

If you would like to get involved early check out our sponsorship packages for TP Day 2024 here.