“Should the Transport Planning Society become the Triple Access Planning Society?” asks Stephen Cragg, Head of Appraisal and Model Development at Transport Scotland. The LATIS service is operated by Transport Scotland with the objective to meet the appraisal and modelling needs of the Scottish Government. LATIS stands for Land-use And Transport Integration in Scotland. Stephen is also putting forward the proposition that this becomes TAPIS – the Triple Access Planning In Scotland service.

He was one of 5 people on the panel for last week’s PTRC Fireside Chat ‘Triple Access Planning: Changing transport planning in a changing world’, expertly chaired by Ben Plowden (Chair of the Transport Planning Society) and ably supported by Shania McCalla-Radcliffe from PTRC.

You can watch the recording on YouTube.

Here’s a taste of what panel members had to say:

“We’ve seen a significant increase in local authorities/regional authorities really picking up Triple Access Planning (TAP) and we’re seeing this coming through in the briefs that are being issued, particularly around local transport plans … and what else I think is new and worth discussion today is our increasing ability to access and use data to bring TAP to life” – Annette Smith, Mott MacDonald.

“I sit within the Places Directorate … which includes transport, it includes land use, it includes planning, it includes digital so actually I’m in this really perfect place to be able to have really strong conversations with regards to TAP …TAP acts as this decision wheel for me to help have the conversations in a really healthy and constructive way about what we’re doing. TAP helps me break down the silos between, and the mentality of silo working that you can often find within local authorities” – Rose McArthur, Cheshire West and Chester Council.

“I really welcome TAP and we’ve tried to apply principles of it to the Glasgow Transport Strategy …. which … is very much vision-led, so decide and provide is one of the key principles of TAP as opposed to predict and provide … I really like in TAP the focus on system-based approach … looking at external factors and how that may influence demand for travel in future, we’ve also incorporated that into our appraisal work for the Transport Strategy … we’ve also tried to apply scenario planning to our Strategy work and identified three plausible future scenarios and tested our appraisal interventions against that” – D. Paton, Glasgow City Council

“We need to do somthing differently because nowhere in the world has ever managed to volutarily or deliberately reduce traffic … if it ever goes down is usually because there’s been an economic crisis … decision makers are very very very invested in risk – we can’t always get rid of it … if it’s a ridiculous thing to think we can eliminate the risk of uncertainty, we’re going to need to work with it and whilst we can’t eliminate it, we can have a damn good go at managing it” – Stephen Cragg, Transport Scotland

#TripleAccessPlanning