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If we’re serious about sustainability, why is the car still king?

We know our reliance on cars is bad for us – bad for our health, bad for the environment and bad for the economy. Yet the way we plan and build continues as if it were still the 1950s and the car a watchword for freedom.

Shortsighted transport planning has damaged many towns over recent decades. From clone towns to subtopia, bland, near-identical housing developments have encircled us with car-dependent ghettoes for increasingly scarce nuclear families. Fancy a faux-Georgian box with parking for three cars? No problem. Fancy walking to the shops? No chance.

Business parks with football pitch sized car parks have sprung up by main roads. Retail parks – originally home to DIY superstores – now house what used to be high street brands like Next and M&S.

Local planning and transport has been pretty clear for some time that these patterns of development are not desirable. A quick flick through virtually any local transport plan reveals positive language about reducing reliance on the private car, improving public health, revitalising the town centres and tackling carbon emissions.

There are many reasons why policy has failed to match practice, including everything from simple inertia to corporate bullying. It has never been the case, however, that development based around better public transport and active travel couldn’t work – it does.

Take Kilnwood Vale – a 2,500 house extension of Crawley in West Sussex. BedZED it isn’t, but county and district councils were serious about avoiding yet another faceless, car-dependent suburb. Instead, they agreed a design intended to minimise traffic generation with roads wide and straight enough to suit buses. Of the three access roads into the development, two are bus only with the third having bus priority.

‘We need transport models that help set where we want to go rather than focusing on where we’ve just been.’

Major city centre regeneration schemes like Hull and Liverpool have their detractors, but building in improved public space and public transport connections have at least made accessibility a virtue and given people the choice to leave the car at home. Even business parks (which so often make a virtue of their plentiful free parking) are getting in on the act. When complete, the Quorum Business Park near Newcastle will host 8,000 staff over 1.5 million square feet of office space. Despite its location being selected because of easy access to the trunk road network, fewer than half of staff are expected to arrive by car. This is being achieved through a mixture of soft and hard measures with limits to parks spaces being complemented with a full-time travel co-ordinator to advise of alternative ways to getting to work, strong public transport links with discounted ticket prices, the establishment of cycling routes and initiatives such as free bike workshops all contributing.

None of this is perfect nor is it representative of most new development. But it is a definite improvement and the challenge is to nurture it. So how do we make more of it happen?

First, planning guidance needs reform so economic growth is no longer allowed to trump essential considerations like environment and health. We need transport models that help set where we want to go rather than focusing on where we’ve just been. Finally, we must be bolder. We need to overcome outdated views about the effectiveness of public transport and plan new development which actively discourages over-reliance on cars and supports walking, cycling and public transport.

Andrew Allen
Andrew Allen is policy analyst for Campaign for Better Transport. He has worked in public policy for the last 15 years for a range of voluntary organisations across transport, environment and land-use planning. He tweets at ‪@AndrewAllen74
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