Placing the public in integrated transport planning Chris Booth a , Tim Richardson b, * a School of Environment and Development, Shef®eld Hallam University, City Campus, Pond Street, Shef®eld S1 1WB, UK b Department of Town and Regional Plannning, University of Shef®eld, Shef®eld S10 2TN, UK Accepted 1 January 2001 Abstract The paper argues the need for a more nuanced debate over the place of public involvement in transport planning in Britain, in the context of the current democratic turn in governance. The recent policy shift towards integrated transport has been accompanied by signi®cant institutional changes, which have created a new framework for transport planning, with important implications for public involvement. Yet many issues underlying the new participative approach to transport planning have yet to be resolved. In this paper, the wider socio- political context for increasing inclusivity in planning processes is discussed, followed by a brief analysis of the condition of public involvement in transport planning in Britain. A conceptual framework then draws together the issues to be considered when planning programmes for public involvement in transport planning. q 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The 1998 White Paper on integrated transport (DETR, 1998a) sought to recast the landscape of transport planning in Britain. It marked the demise of an era of planning for transport on the basis of forecast demand, and the beginning of the institutionalisation of a `new realism' (Goodwin et al., 1991), heralding a new era of demand management, where road building is no longer regarded as the a priori solution to the problem of increasing traf®c congestion. Politically, it may mark the end of a period where transport decisions have become highly contentious and the legitimacy of the policy process has been severely challenged. The eventual outcome may be to restore public legitimacy for transport planning. However, much of the policy debate which preceded the White Paper focused on the formulation of policy measures which might tackle dif®cult contemporary transport problems, and potentially catastrophic traf®c fore- casts, with considerably less attention given to a re-exam- ination of the processes and frameworks for transport policy making, and in particular the place of public involvement within them. The White Paper, followed by a suite of detailed guidance documents, a 10 year action plan (DETR, 2000a) and culmi- nating in the 2000 Transport Act (UK Government, 2000), establish a new framework for transport planning, with a new two tier system of local transport plans (LTPs) and regio- nal transport strategies, with the ®rst full LTPs submitted by local authorities in 2000. The importance of local legitimisa- tion is highlighted, with the requirement that local authorities' new powers should `be used as part of clear transport strategies that have the backing of local communities' (DETR, 1998a, chapter 1). However the Transport Act does not contain a clear statement of exactly how public involvement should be inte- grated into the new LTP framework, apart from the need to ensure that plans once complete are available on a reasonable basis to the public. The lack of detailed attention to public involvement in the development of plans is surprising, given both the frequent criticism of decision-making processes in transport in the past, and the current democratic turn at all levels of government across many policy sectors, which is characterised by a rapid uptake of public participation programmes. In this paper, we argue that transport planning has reached a crossroads over the future of public involvement, which has yet to be resolved in the construction of the new transport planning framework. The current socio-political context, policy climate and emerging institutional frame- work demand critical re¯ection on the role of public invol- vement in both developing a more responsive, inclusionary and legitimate transport planning process, and in moving towards integrated transport objectives. This re¯ection is required as the balance is being recast between the techni- cal, expert driven techniques which characterised `predict and provide' transport planning, and the new participative techniques trickling into the transport domain from other Transport Policy 8 (2001) 141±149 PERGAMON 0967-070X/01/$ - see front matter q 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0967-070X(01)00004-X www.elsevier.com/locate/tranpol * Corresponding author. Tel.: 144-114-2226179; fax: 144-114- 2722199. E-mail address: tim.richardson@shef®eld.ac.uk (T. Richardson).