Integrated transport: from policy to practice

The gap between the design of transport policy and its delivery at the national and local levels has widened. Integrated transport: from policy to practice is a bold attempt to bridge that gap. The book is based on the outcomes of a seminar supported by the Network for European Communications and Transport Activities Research. The editors, Moshe Givoni and David Bannister, are two of transport’s leading proponents and have called for it to be anchored within the wider sustainable development agenda. The edited volume is aimed at practitioners from various disciplines, and decisionmakers at the local, national and European levels. It brings together the perspectives of over 30 scholars from many countries – including, among others, the UK, France, Israel and the USA – in 18 peer-reviewed papers which seek to answer three broad questions: what is integration, why is it important, and why has it proved so difficult to deliver? To this end, the authors describe the wider context in which transport policy could, given the right conditions, lead to a (more) integrated transport network. The contributions cover four main themes. Part one addresses the main issues and hence focuses on the macro-level drivers of transport policy, including, for example, the relationship between spatial planning and transport demand. Part two looks at the application of integrated transport policy. Chapter eight, for example, proposes a new metric – the travel time ratio – to determine the extent to which travel behaviour is shaped by the duration of travel trips relative to daily activities. Part three addresses the role of appraisal methods, specifically criteria used to assess the relative costs and benefits of transport projects. Part four focuses on the main challenges to the delivery of integrated transport at various scales. Identifying the multiple scales at which integration operates, the authors identify five dimensions (horizontal, vertical, spatial, temporal and modal) and five domains (substantive, institutional, methodological, procedural and policy). Understanding the nature of integration is important; more important is the need to reach a point where responses to, for example, the costs of excessive car travel can be rolled out at the operational level. To this end, the editors identify three specific challenges: