TRANSLAND: A STUDY ON INTEGRATED LAND-USE AND TRANSPORT PLANNING

Strong and ongoing growth in mobility, especially in road traffic, means that transport trends are unsustainable if only current policies are pursued. The EC 4th Framework project TRANSLAND addressed these issues. The focus of the work was on the development of innovative policies for integrated land-use transportation planning at the urban level, and the related enabling institutional conditions. Because urban areas cannot be considered in isolation their interaction with their regional, national and international environment were also considered, and because many planning procedures are vertically coordinated on different administration levels, the inter- and supra- urban level were also taken into account. Central and fundamental themes to the approach of the project were two closely related and inter-connected concepts that may be labeled as 'what' and 'how'. 'What' relates to land-use/transport systems, policies and measures, while 'how' relates to the coordination of transport and land-use policies under different institutional arrangements. The project sought to review the state of the art in the theory of land-use transport interaction at the urban/regional level and to develop a conceptual framework for the analysis of current practice. Through a case-study approach a review of practices in urban land-use/transport planning in European countries was conducted to examine the development, implementation and impact of integrated land-use/transport. From a synthesize of these results the project sought to identify best practices in the field of integrating transport and land-use planning, taking into account sustainability objectives, and to analyze their transferability (towards other countries/settings/spatial levels), including legal and regulatory requirements. The second main output of the study was a selection and prioritization of the principal research areas and which constituted input for the future research agenda of the EC. Through these activities TRANSLAND has provided a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art and state of the practice in transport and land use planning in the EU. Some innovative policies and best practices were highlighted through the evaluation of twenty-six case studies. This work continues in the on-going TRANSPLUS project. The study developed a structured overview of issues in land-use transport integration at the urban level, analyzing the outcomes of the reviews of the state of the art and current practices in Europe. The aim of the structured overview was to present a clear and exhaustive vision of the issues at stake. TRANSLAND went on to clarify the need for further research concerning the interaction between transport and land use.