Halcrow worked with the East of England Development Agency on a study to research and develop sustainable transport options as part of the Labour government’s ‘Delivering a Sustainable Transport System’ (DaSTS) initiative.
Over 500,000 new homes and 450,000 new jobs are planned in the region’s seven key development centres in the next 20 years. The outline study aimed to pave the way for Department for Transport funding for a more detailed study of sustainable, low cost and high impact transport measures.
Project challenges and goals
- to summarise the issues and problems facing all of the region’s key centres of development and change now and in the future
- to work with stakeholders to supply detailed research in the two growth areas
- to generate low cost, high impact proposals which have been appraised against the identified challenges
- to identify ways of reducing the number of individual car trips the new developments would generate
Halcrow’s role
Our role was to work with both the client (East of England Development Agency) and to liaise with the Department for Transport. We were also required to research the two key centres of development and change, speak to relevant local authorities and hold consultation exercises with stakeholders.
Halcrow delivered
- the inception of the project
- research into transport issues in each area
- an assessment of key socio-economic issues that could be partially addressed through transport provision
- innovative interventions for the two case study areas generated jointly with stakeholders
- qualitative appraisal of the measures against the goals of the study which also addresses the problems and issues uncovered during the research stage
Outcomes and achievements
Our innovative thinking generated a list of suggested transport interventions for the two growth areas. We used a bottom-up approach to generate our proposals which looked at each challenge in its local context.
Halcrow developed a number of low cost solutions which involved non-transport measures such as improving broadband connections. In King’s Lynn we identified a change in school hours and staggered term times as one of the key ways to address traffic congestion in the town centre.