Letter to TPS Members from Mark Frost, incoming TPS Chair

It was a great honour to be elected to the position of chair of the Transport Planning Society in March, following in the footsteps of Steve Bennett.

For those that don’t know me, I am currently a Director at Fern Consulting, however the bulk of my career to date has been spent working in transport and environmental strategy in Local Government, my last role before leaving for the private sector being Assistant Director of Transport, Parking and Environmental Strategy at the London Borough of Hounslow.

Before I go on to talk a bit about some of my emerging thoughts and priorities for my two year term as Chair of TPS, I wanted to say a few words about Steve.

Finishing his two-year term as Chair, and also his six year stretch on the TPS board back in March, Steve has been hugely influential in shaping the role of the society – particularly over these last turbulent twelve months.  During this time availability of the volunteer time that the society relies on so much to keep things going was scarcer than ever – and in many circumstances I know he shouldered much of the workload to keep the show on the road himself.  On behalf of the society, and myself, I’d like to offer deep our appreciation to him for that.

During his term, Steve embraced the challenge of optimising the nuts and bolts of running a society of over 1500 members.  Part of that was the introduction of a more interactive committee structure – providing focus on key issues such as skills, membership and events, whilst also building our capacity to bring in a greater range of voices to help with and inform policy responses for example. 

As the baton of Chair passes from him to me I’d like to continue build on his good work by exploring further the ways to pull down the walls between the society and our members - and indeed also the general public more generally.  To this end we are keen to explore, and harness better, the growing number of digital tools for interaction we have all had to become so familiar with over the last year for this purpose, and I look forward to sharing with members our ideas on this further in the coming months. 

We are of course always open to suggestions as to how we can improve engagement so if you have any good ideas for what we could do better please do take a second to share those with us.

Thinking more broadly about what the focus for the society over the coming two years should be, I looked back at our founding statement from 1997 for inspiration: “TPS exists to facilitate, develop and promote best practice and innovation in transport planning and provide a focus for dialogue between all those engaged in it whatever their background.”

As a statement of intent that seems as relevant a mission now as it ever was, with those references to explore opportunities around ‘innovation’ and ‘whatever their background’ jumping out at me as being particularly apposite for further exploration.

Thinking first on ‘innovation’.  It is often said that the pace of change seems to be speeding up - and no time has that seemed more true than in 2020 and 2021 so far.  And no industry has arguably been more deeply impacted at a fundamental level by the forces for societal change unleashed across the last 12 months than ours.   Innovation in how we plan and deliver our services is therefore necessary and indeed unavoidable - and that’s before we even get to the need to respond to the air quality, climate and ecological emergencies that so many local areas have all declared.

The term ‘innovation’ is often used as shorthand for the application of new technology for the purposes of improving the actual function of moving people and goods around – autonomous cars, , micro-mobility solutions, wayfinding apps etc.  Whilst this is where a lot of creative disruption no doubt occurs, for us as a sector at this time I think the focus needs to be as strong on innovating how we approach building consensus for a need to change with our public stakeholders.

I stumbled upon an excellent Connected Places podcast (Connected Places Podcast - Episode 11 - Where next for urban mobility? (catapult.org.uk)) the other day with Daniel Deparis, head of Urban Mobility at Mercedes Benz.  Surprising for someone with innovation in his remit, his expressed view was that ‘we need to scale solutions of today before we start talking about the next thing’.  He also noted that ‘building a community and taking people with us on this journey and to involve them from the beginning before the building of new things is as complicated as putting the technological solutions in place.’

These last words of Daniel’s words chimed with me, possibly given my recent coal face experience of being a local authority officer implementing schemes under the Active Travel Fund and finding the limits to radical changes to our public spaces to deliver healthier and more sustainable futures weren’t technological, financial or even really political – they were all societal.

With many of us in the sector spending time trying to figure out the import to our work of the longer term societal changes arising from the pandemic, I get the feeling that the last 12 months have crystallised in many people's mind the need for us to apply ourselves more to collaboration with society in jointly setting a desirable vision for the future of our public realm and working towards that, rather than letting us be guided too much in designing interventions that mainly seek to serve our current travel behaviours - which are often just a rational response to (and a product of) mistakes of the past. 

In that respect, the area we need to innovate quickest perhaps is in how we articulate to an often deeply sceptical and sometimes cynical audience how the changes we are trying to implement can deliver a better future for them and the next generations = the idea of ‘becoming better ancestors’ perhaps. 

The recent Royal College of Arts project on 'our future towns' (Our Future Towns | Royal College of Art (rca.ac.uk)  TPS  co-sponsored  last year offers some very valuable lessons in how innovative and constructive community engagement can offer potential solutions to this challenge.  

I would welcome further dialogue with members on where other best practice in engagement and population level behaviour change may lie, with a view to have TPS help facilitate a conversation around the ‘state of the art’ in this vital area of our work over the next couple of years.

I see TPS as the perfect vehicle to travel together in to explore our common challenges and opportunities 'whatever our background' - and whilst the joy and strength of our industry is that we do draw on a very wide range of expertise, unfortunately too many of our backgrounds look a lot like me, white, male and probably something like middle class.  Group think is no solution to the challenges we face and we must improve actual diversity, diversity of thought and inclusion in the industry - and I'm delighted that this forms the theme of our Transport Planning Day campaign for this year.  

I must also thank all those companies who have rushed to support Transport Planning Day this year, particularly AECOM as our platinum sponsor.  The level of support to our call for sponsors in these uncertain times was hugely motivating for the Society and goes to prove what an important topic this is for the whole of sector.  I read that as boding well for our ability to progress genuine changes in the coming years for the better.  There are still opportunities for sponsorship available so please do contact us if you would like to get involved in what is fast becoming an important date in the diary for collective reflection across our industry.

I look forward to working with my excellent board, and indeed all TPS members, on these crucial challenges, and no doubt many others, over the next couple of years. 

Mark Frost 

TPS Chair 

Contact us at info@tps.org.uk