Rating the Transport Sustainability of New Urban Developments: a starting point and ways forward

Abstract

With the 'sustainable city' now the dominant paradigm in Australian urban planning there is growing acceptance of transit oriented design (TOD) and New Urbanist concepts in planning policy and practice. Responding to increasingly extended journey-to-work and other trip movements, land use developers are being encouraged to ensure new development proposals create the potential for populations to make shorter journeys and to make mode shifts away from the private motor car and towards walking, cycling and public transport. Planning instruments are seeking increased land use mixing, densification around nodes, as well as a series of urban configurations and built form attributes that are considered conducive to sustainable travel behaviour. However, not all development proposals display these qualities - or at least not in sufficient measure to suggest they will be superior to previous generations of development - despite their marketing to local government and the community as sustainable settlements. It is difficult for local and state government decision-makers to cost-effectively determine just what potential specific development proposals have to decrease journey lengths for particular trip purposes, to encourage walking or cycling trips, or to support public transport operations. No decision-support tools are readily available to decision-makers to establish whether, say, either a new master planned community development on the urban fringe or a large mixed-use inner city redevelopment project actually provide the capacity for improved mode share for sustainable modes or for decreased journey lengths. The paper seeks to provide a framework for the development of such a decision-making tool at the local-area/community scale