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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.
Did you miss this year's Transport Planning Day? You can watch it online if you did.
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 took 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.
Did you miss this year's Transport Planning Day? You can watch it online if you did.
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 unpacked 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
Speakers
Lilian Greenwood was appointed Minister for the Future of Roads at the Department for Transport on 9 July 2024.
She was re-elected as the MP for Nottingham South in July 2024, and has represented the constituency since May 2010.
Lilian was Shadow Secretary of State for Transport between 2015 and 2016, also operating as Shadow Rail Minister from 2011 to 2015. Lilian was appointed Opposition Deputy Chief Whip by Sir Keir Starmer in May 2021, occupying the role until 2023 when she was made Shadow Minister for Arts, Heritage, and Civil Society.
Lilian also chaired the Transport Select Committee from July 2017 to January 2020.
Steve Gooding - Director, RAC Foundation
Steve is Director of the RAC Foundation, an independent motoring research charity. Foundation output has covered many aspects of motoring policy, urban mobility, transport technology, tackling vehicle emissions and the transition to zero carbon motoring. Steve has long been involved with the Transport for New Homes initiative.
Before taking over at the Foundation in 2015 Steve enjoyed a long civil service career, joining in 1983 after graduating from Durham University, and moving to the Transport Department in 1987. After spells at the Office of the Rail Regulator and the Cabinet Office, he was DfT’s Director General for Roads, Traffic & Local Transport from 2009-2015.
Steve is a Visiting Professor at the University of the West of England, past President of CILT UK, a trustee of the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, a regular columnist in Highways magazine and commentator on transport issues in the media.
Sharon Payne - Regional Rural Mobility Manager, Transport East
Sharon is the Regional Rural Mobility Manager at Transport East, the Sub-National Transport Body for the East. She heads up an exciting area of work leading on delivering the national Rural Mobility Centre of Excellence with a wide range of stakeholders from across government, academia, tourism and business. The RMCoE focuses on research, evidence building and continuing to make the case for investment in rural transport and the challenges faced, an area omitted from much national and regional research and policy development in recent years.
Sharon has an extensive career in local government, including roles as strategic lead for behaviour change, road safety strategy, travel planning and the active travel delivery team. This includes securing £1.5million for Suffolk to deliver one of eleven Active Travel Social Prescribing Pilots across England and developing the Suffolk Air Quality Profile with Public Health and the District Councils.
Sharon also worked for the Department for Education during the Travelling to School Initiative as the Regional School Travel Advisor, managing the work of ten Local Authorities to successfully meet the challenging targets and objectives set by Government.
Ed Downer - Transport and Mobility Associate, Buro Happold
Ed is a chartered transport planning specialist based in Leeds with Buro Happold with over seventeen years of experience in the UK and abroad. His expertise covers transport policy and strategy, modelling and sustainable transport, with recent projects including inputs to the West Yorkshire Connectivity Infrastructure Plan and Leeds Local Plan. He helps clients realise the potential their investments can offer, developing compelling visions and cases for change, underpinned by robust evidence and appraisal. His current interests include bringing “decide and provide” and “triple access planning” into mainstream strategy development, and helping clients and colleagues map out plausible and preferable scenarios for future transport and behaviour change. Ed is a TPS mentor and currently chairs the Chartered Institution for Highways and Transportation’s (CIHT) Yorkshire and The Humber region.
Fiona Brown - Interim Director of Transport Strategy and Analysis, Transport Scotland
I joined the Scottish Government and Transport Scotland in 2013 and prior to that, I worked at one of the major engineering consultancies for 11 years as a transport planner.
I have a degree in Civil engineering and an MSc in Transport Planning and Engineering. I am a Chartered Engineer, a volunteer with Women in Transport and lead for the transport planning graduate development programme in Transport Scotland.
As Director for Transport Strategy and Analysis, my portfolio represents a broad range of technical, analytical, policy and coordination areas, including: constitution and UK relations, child poverty and climate change; Just transition, Covid strategy, economic development, land-use and planning; Future of transport governance, public transport and demand from travel; and transport economics, statistics, modelling and research.
It’s a broad and diverse portfolio and I am proud to lead a Directorate of highly skilled analysts and policy leads, as we strive for better cross-government working and collaboration, inclusive stakeholder engagement, evidence-led policy making, and to provide effective advice across our wide-ranging portfolio.
Izzy Romilly - Sustainable Transport Research and Campaign Manager, Possible
With experience across climate campaigning, community activism, and working with local government, Izzy brings a broad perspective to transport. She manages campaigns in partnership with charities, unions and campaigners, aiming to bring a safer, fairer and more sustainable transport system to life. As a trustee of the London Cycling Campaign, and a co-organiser of LCC's Women's Network, she's particularly interested in equality and accessibility alongside climate action. Some of the current and recent projects she manages at Possible include Hot Wheels and Clean Cars for Carers.
Tim Steiner - Divisional Director, Jacobs
Tim Steiner is a Divisional Director in Jacob’s transport planning team. He has been at the forefront of some of the key changes in transport planning in the UK over two and a half decades, including building the understand of transport’s impacts on public health outcomes, and the use of social marketing techniques in our sector. In his recent work to understand the opportunities and challenges to reducing traffic levels, he has been assessing not only the effects of different measures on net car-km but also considering the socio-demographic effects; the relative winners and losers from different potential policy options.
David Connolly - Director of Low Carbon Mobility, Systra
David is SYSTRA’s Director of Low Carbon Mobility, with over 33 years’ experience of predicting and appraising the impacts of measures designed to influence travel behaviour in the UK & Ireland (and beyond). His recent experience includes his key role in the development of Transport Decarbonisation Strategies for Ireland (2021-2023) and for the Isle of Man Government (2023), the development of a ‘Transport Decarbonisation Playbook’ tool to quantify the carbon reduction impacts of local transport measures which will be used as part the English LTP4 process and over 33 years of research into UK and Ireland travel behaviour, including EV ownership and use, car-sharing, active travel, mode choice and long distance commuting.
He was also closely involved in SYSTRA’s scenario-based predictions of the medium and long-term impacts of Covid19 on UK travel patterns and a wide range of other technical innovation relating to the modelling and appraisal of transport schemes and strategies.
He became a Chartered Transport Planning Professional (cTPP) in 2011. He has provided expert witness evidence at/to a number of Scottish Public Inquiries and Parliamentary Committees and was a Director of the Transport Planning Society between 2015 and March 2021.
Hannah Donovan - Transport Modeller, Transport for London
Hannah is a transport modeller in Transport for London’s Public Transport Service Planning team. She is experienced in developing business cases, forecasting and benefits realisation, most recently for the Elizabeth Line. Hannah has a background in public transport and highway modelling at both a strategic and microsimulation level. Hannah is currently pursuing a PhD with the Bartlett’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, developing an agent-based model examining street users behaviours and interactions with e-scooters.
Did you miss this year's Transport Planning Day? You can watch it online if you did.
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