The Transport Practitioners' Meeting (TPM) is the annual meeting place for all transport planners, modellers, placemakers, highway engineers and urban transport designers. TPM brings the transport and built environment community together for two days of world class networking, idea sharing and lively debate.

Air-quality remains very much at the top of the political agenda in the UK. Whilst everybody has a duty to minimise emissions to air the key stakeholders responsible for managing local air-quality are local and highway authorities.  In 2017 the Joint Air-Quality Unit (an amalgamation of practitioners from DEFRA and the DfT) issued a National Plan to deal nitrogen dioxide pollution. The plan coincided with legal challenges principally by Clientearth who are pressing all levels of government to take assertive action in resolving air-quality to be within nationally based air quality...

The festive season is my favourite time of year; it is even more of a delight to live in London as the lights turn on, the Christmas trees go up and the mulled wine is warmed. The weather isn’t too bad either if you ask me, better than back home in Calgary with thirty below and three feet of snow! And don’t forget, 15 December is Christmas Jumper Day, a yearly tradition I now cherish since moving here. I have definitely lined up the world’s best/worst ugly Christmas jumper for the festivities, please drop me a line if you would like to see it in all its terrible glory.

TPM is the annual meeting place for all transport planners, placemakers, highway engineers and urban transport designers. TPM brings the wider transport and built environment community together for two days of world class networking, idea sharing and lively debate.

Expectations are high, the rhetoric is abundant, the dollar signs astronomical and in all of that hype transport modellers are expected to forecast what the impacts of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) may be, for transport strategy purposes but also for the return on investment of large and costly infrastructure projects. Is there anything sensible that we can contribute to the debate, any reasonable and defensible numbers that we can produce that will add structure to decision-making?

Friedrich Nietzsche once declared that “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” This is backed up by studies by Stanford University which have shown that a person’s creative output increases by an average of 60% when walking.

The bus historically has faced a challenge to sustain itself.  Increasing social aspiration and car ownership from the 1950s onwards drove a continuous decline in patronage which has only recently  been arrested; fixes such as driver only buses and improved maintenance regimes failed to stem the decline with only growth in London in the 2000s stemming this tide of decline in overall usage.   Internal to the bus industry has been a ‘cycle of decline’ with reducing patronage forcing costs to be spread over fewer users driving reductions in service levels...

We sit down with Michelle Wood, Head of Technical Development at PTRC to talk about the 20-Week Evening Lecture Series. Here’s what she had to say…

The title of this piece could be read in a sarcastic tone but the aim of this piece is to show that cycling really is a complex mode to design for.  A mode in fact, about which the very question of whether it needs anything specifically designed for it, is brought into question.  I usually start cycling design training sessions with a very zen statement: There is no such thing as a cycling scheme and there is no such thing as a scheme that isn’t a cycling scheme.  The point is that you cannot design exclusively for cyclists without considering the impacts on other road...

Originally published on transportfutures.co Last week, 28 - 29 June 2017, transport planning in the UK had its big annual bash, the Transport Practitioners Meeting, where for the second year running it found itself in the underrated Midlands city of Nottingham. The great and the good of transport planning where there (although notably only one person who I saw from the Department for Transport), as well as a great mix of graduates, researchers, old hands, and young upstarts. Originally published on transportfutures.co Last week, 28 - 29 June 2017, transport planning in...