The Relevance of Traditional Town Planning Concepts for Travel Minimization

Abstract

The ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘self-containment’ are longstanding town planning concepts aimed at travel minimization. While they remain central to practice, the transit-oriented development concept brings into question the relevance of planning for self-containment. Instead, the intention of transit-oriented development is to provide for travel both within the neighbourhood and within the sub-region. By examining the extent to which Perth residents actually minimize travel, we show that the planning concepts of ‘neighbourhood’ and of ‘self-containment’ need refinement. For the neighbourhood there is a question of scale. For self-containment there is a need to concentrate employment destinations around railway stations and to resist locations that do not meet this criterion. ‘Self-containment’ is an ill-defined concept that must be given clearer focus.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the factors that made this work possible: research funding from an Australian Research Council Grant LP0562422 and our industry partners—Peet and Co., Department for Planning and Infrastructure, Public Transport Authority, Landcorp, East Perth, Subiaco and Midland Redevelopment Authorities, Cities of Cockburn, Melville and Rockingham and Town of Kwinana—research assistants Courtney Babb, Roger Mellor and Melanie Montgomery; field survey staff Yu Chow, Brendan Foley, Tony Goh, Daniel Hills, Steven Martion, Tom Pacy, Nicholas Paravicini, Lana Tian and Rebecca Thompson; and geocoders Janni Curtis and Jake Schapper. The authors thank the editor and the two reviewers for their useful comments, which helped improve this paper.

Notes

Travel minimization can be defined by two objectives: to reduce travel distance and/or to shift the mode of travel from car towards more sustainable modes (walking, cycling and public transport).

We acknowledge that the accessibility (latent construct) indicators do not have the properties of a continuous variable, but they were factor analysed and the scales (not a single item) used here did not violate the skewness assumptions of ANOVA.

Each family member who travelled independently during the set travel day had to fill in a trip diary that included spatial and temporal information on origin and destination of each leg of the trip, purpose, by which means of transport, out-of-pocket costs and parking options. To assist in difficulties with self-completion, memory joggers were handed out to the family during the household survey in order to assist the completion of the trip diaries; the trip diaries were then collected after the nominated travel day by the field assistant who checked the completeness and accuracy of the information. Data entry, validation, and geo-coding were realized within 6 months of the field work.

Affordability is applied here as a perception indicator, which has the highest value in Wellard and diminishes as we move towards Bull Creek. Its variation is consistent with the variation of housing prices in the three precincts and the household income.