wiki:ruprec_transurb

Integrate transport and urban planning

Although interactions between transport and land use are widely recognized, regional and local practice often lack integration of land use planning and transport projects. This leads to severe impacts on the alpine environment and to the overexploitation and inefficient use of natural resources, e.g. regarding land development, traffic, air pollution and fuel consumption. In order to decrease these impacts, it is important to integrate land use planning and transport planning.

For this, it is first of all essential to raise awareness and build knowledge among stakeholders who are concerned by and drive land use development. In this regard, the Moreco project has delivered some valuable tools to raise the awareness of households, mobility actors, planners and decision-makers; tools that should be used.

Second, integration of transport and urban planning requires both the integration between planning and transport sectors (horizontal integration) as well as the integration between different administrative scales (vertical integration). As an example, we might consider strategic planning documents at regional scale. Indeed, some of these documents developed for alpine urban regions have already put forward integrated orientations for urban development (e.g. in Grenoble or Geneva, see WIKIAlps planning documents). It seems important to overcome differences in competences across administrative scales, notably by creating formal and informal institutional scenes that allow for integration (see Governance). These scenes could also serve to horizontally integrate the planning and the transport sector. A second example are single transport or infrastructure projects. Such projects should more and more integrate planning measures, e.g. through changes to local land use regulations. They usually involve a smaller number of municipalities and stakeholders, and thus integration might be easier to implement.

Overall, the integration of urban and transport planning requires scenes that link stakeholders, local representatives as well as technicians, from both sectors and all concerned administrative levels. Moreco has also gathered good practices that combine settlement development and transport development. Examples relate to railway-oriented settlement development, urban development projects at transport hubs, or cooperative spatial strategies for a city region.