Strategic Planning

Forget the Outliers: Lessons from Typical Transport Cities

Transport research and policy briefs often use case studies of exceptional places. This paper takes a different approach, comparing typical transport cities in Germany and England, revealing some interesting insights.

Key Takeaways

• Typical mobility cities in Germany have seen a marked reduction in car use and an increase in cycling in the past two decades. In contrast, in typical mobility cities in England, modal shares have remained more or less stable.
• Multiple factors appear to affect modal share, including:
  • The spatial structure and urban form of a city.
  • The supply and design of transport infrastructure and services.
  • Cultural, governance, and leadership factors

Recommendations:

Spatial structure and urban form:

• Take account of each city’s macro-level structure and micro-level urban form when designing integrated transport policy.
• Integrate policymaking at all levels of government across transport, spatial planning, land use and local industrial strategies.
• Promote growth in urban cores, instead of the urban periphery.
• Connect new edge-of-town developments with sustainable transport infrastructure and services.

Transport infrastructure and services:

• Shift more strongly within the transport planning profession towards integrated transport planning.
• Use revisions to the Treasury Green Book to update the transport appraisal and business case process to prioritise improving accessibility.
• Learn from the German model of the Verkehrsverbund for regional integrated public transport bodies.

Culture, governance and leadership:

• Continue to devolve more powers and funding to Mayoral Strategic Authorities over planning and delivery of large-scale integrated transport infrastructure projects.
• Support Mayoral Strategic Authorities to build capacity for coordinated policymaking across local growth plans, spatial planning, land use and transport.
• Support ambitious local leaders by promoting greater public participation in the policy design and delivery of travel demand management (“sticks”).

Data and evidence:

• Start collecting all-trip modal share data at the city level.
• Set up a UK What Works Centre for Integrated Transport.

Comment

Whilst this paper is based on comparing cities in Germany and England, many of the lessons could be applied to cities everywhere:

• Integrate transport and land use.
• Devolve powers and funding.
• Integrate transport across modes.

What Next?

Are you integrating transport modes and combining transport and land use planning?

Strategic Planning

What Colorado's Transport Pipeline Reveals About the Whole Sector

The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has released its latest 10-year strategic project pipeline. Normally, I would not be interested in a project pipeline, but this analysis revealed something important about transport planning.

Key Takeaways

• The 10-Year Plan is designed to deliver tangible results for CDOT’s primary goal areas:
  • Fix Our Roads - Prioritize strategic investments in Colorado’s highways to improve infrastructure conditions.
  • Advancing Transportation Safety - Colorado is committed to providing a safe and efficient transportation network.
  • Sustainably Increase Transportation Choice - Provide alternatives to single-occupancy vehicle travel that increase choices and reduce air pollution from transportation.
• Colorado has strong goals and performance metrics for transportation, climate, and safety.
• The last update in 2022 allocated significantly less money to highway expansions and redirected billions of dollars toward safety, affordability, road quality and greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
• In 2025, CDOT hosted a series of telephone town halls to understand how Coloradans want the department to invest its funding. Respondents allocated 37% to transit, biking, and walking, 33% to road repair and maintenance, and just 13% to highway expansion.
• Statewide polling from March 2025 found that a majority of voters would prefer more investment in public transit over building and expanding roads – 55% to 45%.
• CDOT is making progress on road and bridge conditions. The share of interstate pavement in poor condition fell from 3.9% in 2020 to 1.6% in 2025.
• Traffic deaths and serious injuries have been rising over the last few years.
• Colorado’s most recent GHG Progress Report projects transportation emissions to be 24 million metric tons (MMT) by 2030, 6 MMT above the state target.
• Road safety, repairs, and maintenance account for nearly 50% of the 10-Year Plan budget, while road capacity projects account for 36% and Transit and Multimodal Transportation combine for 15%
• The 10-Year Plan includes roughly $3.7 billion in highway widening projects.
• The proposed 10-Year Plan makes minimal progress toward improving safety for vulnerable road users, with bike and pedestrian projects only accounting for 2% of future spending.

Comment

Colorado demonstrates a common problem that the transport sector is currently experiencing: a significant disconnect between strategic goals and how money is spent, with road expansions continuing to consume a large share of transportation budgets.

Colorado has been particularly inconsistent in how it has wedged highway expansions under its 'fix our roads' goal, which was supposed to be about asset maintenance.

So, even though they are contrary to policy goals and not supported by a majority of the public, highway expansions continue to receive substantial funding at the expense of transit and active transportation. Why?

I suspect that the answer is a combination of vested interests within CDOT (those who work on highway expansions will be pushing for projects), external vested interests, such as road construction companies and influential politicians who have lobbied for the expansions.

It remains a key challenge in transport to find ways to reduce the significant sums of money we continue to spend on poor-value road expansions.

What Next?

Are you struggling to reduce the share of money spent on road expansions?

Strategic Planning

Planning for the Future We Want: The Rise of Vision-Led Planning

Vision-led planning is gaining traction as a replacement for predict-and-provide planning models. This guidance on vision-led planning from the International Transport Forum (ITF) has recently been released.

Key Takeaways

• Vision-led transport planning begins with a shared, clearly articulated aspiration for the future of society, and the role transportation systems play within it.
• A vision-led approach ensures that transport decisions are actively based on the kind of cities, regions and societies we want in the future, rather than assuming existing trends are immutable.
• A vision-led approach translates goals into actionable and measurable outcomes.
• Vision-led approaches are best suited where planning aims to foster transformative change over longer time horizons, especially when there is deep uncertainty.
• Since vision-led approaches entail a cultural shift in planning that may challenge established norms and priorities, they require an explicit, high-level political and institutional mandate.
• Vision-led planning requires consensus-building, new governance mechanisms, and the legitimisation of potentially transformative long-term change.
• A wider toolkit may need to be employed, especially during the early planning stages. These approaches account for uncertainty, explore multiple possible futures, and build shared understanding among diverse stakeholders.
• Permanent stakeholder forums, such as advisory councils or co-decision platforms, are critical for maintaining alignment beyond electoral cycles and mitigating policy reversals.
• Allow for course correction through monitoring and evaluation.
• Draw on a wider range of data when preparing forecasts to account for a range of journey purposes and modal splits, looking beyond commuting trips.
• When modelling a ‘business as usual’ scenario, ensure that it does not become a route to ‘predict and provide’ car-centric outcomes.

Comment

Whilst I like the vision-led planning concept, it is still relatively new. Success will depend on achieving and maintaining the consensus-building required to sustain the approach in the longer term, especially in an increasingly polarised political environment.

What Next?

Are you switching from 'predict and provide' to vision-led planning?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​Mass Transit Agency Fiscal Woes: Nine Tables and Charts - A sobering article showing the sorry state of transit in the United States.
• ​Parking-Induced Madness and Democratic Dysfunction - A blog describing the sad battle in California to replace parking with a park.
• ​User-organized pre-pooled ride-hailing: exploring a new mode - A research paper on the emergence of this new form of shared mobility.

Podcast

Why Are Transport Agencies Poor At Managing Their Assets?

In this week's Transport Leaders podcast, we discussed the problems with asset management in transport agencies.

👂 Listen here.

👀 Watch here.

Tool

The Creation of a National Cycling Data and Analytics Platform

​This paper describes the creation of an integrated data ecosystem for cycling in Australia.