Skills Director Keith Buchan has given a presentation at the Plenary session of TPM discussing the future challenges for transport planners.  He began by pointing to the new skills which would be required, and the need to produce responses which are "sophisticated and persuasive – the impacts of new hardware and software will be very different in different contexts".

He went on to discuss the impact of Brexit, suggesting that transport planners should be "more proactive, produce more penetrating analyses centred on people – not just people as a conceptual whole or average numbers but also as individuals, many of whom do not see the benefits of what we do. We need to ensure that not only do they understand how they can benefit from our work, but that those benefits are there in the first place".  He also said that it "should galvanise us all to promote quality in our public spaces (not just private spaces) – transport is a key influence here; to recommit to a proper analysis of the distributional aspects of our work – not what we do currently; and to be honest about the real economic impacts of transport schemes and their ability or inability to create jobs".

He finished by pointing to the opportunities created by the new apprenticeship scheme to "reach out and ensure that those apprentices are recruited as widely as possible, and TPS shares this aim with the other bodies representing transport and land use planners."

Full speech here