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PAN 57 Planning for Transport

ANNEX D: Transport Assessment

D1. Transport Assessment concerns person trips, not car trips. It is a comprehensive assessment that should enable all the potential transport impacts of a proposed development or redevelopment to be fully understood. The objective should be to encourage sustainable travel in relation to the transport mode hierarchy. The assessment should be presented in clear language so that lay people can understand the implications.

D2. The assessment should present all the transport implications of the proposal but also aim to balance fullness of analysis with simplicity. A comprehensive approach will provide more useful information for decision-makers but may well be an excessive burden on developers. A simple approach may be easier for developers, but not provide sufficient information for effective decisions to be taken.

D3. There are no universally applied thresholds for requiring a detailed Transport Assessment, each application is considered on its own merits. Recommended national guidelines for the requirement to carry out a full transport assessment are listed in the Draft Guide to Transport Assessment. Local authorities are encouraged to lower the threshold where appropriate, i.e. areas particularly sensitive to impact of additional traffic.

D4. These standards should form the basis of discussion and negotiation with a developer. Discussion between a developer and a local authority at an early stage should highlight any additional requirements or changes that may be needed to the layout and design of the proposal. On-going liaison will assist in reaching agreement so that later, and generally more expensive, changes will not be needed.

D5. Transport assessment should aim to provide supporting evidence to accompany the planning application to demonstrate that the development is sited in a location where current and likely future travel behaviour will produce a desired and predicted transport output.

D6. Transport Assessment should initially provide information on the proposals compliance with key site policy. It should set out proposed methods of mitigation designed to reduce adverse transport impacts. Assessments should therefore include the following three main elements:

• An assessment of travel characteristics;
• A description of the measures which are being adopted to influence travel impacts of the proposal;
• A description of the transport impacts of the development in a broader context and how these will be addressed.

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