London - Strategic Design

The Trend

(a) The 2031 ‘Trend’

Land use: The total employment and dwellings are allocated based on the London Plan, draft Regional Spatial Strategies, and TEMPROv4.3, (www.tempro.org.uk). Green belt policies would be maintained and allocation of land for development would be prioritised in the following order: (1) brown field sites; (2) urban/sub-urban areas with good transport accessibility by public transport; and (3) other areas with good accessibility, particularly by public transport.

Transport: A mix of public transport and highways investment (based on extrapolating from the planned 2016 transport networks to year 2031), without road user charging.

(b) 2031 Trend option with Road User Charging

A version of the trend has been developed with road user charging, (RUC). This is used as the Reference Case for comparing with the other options because the same distance-based road user charging, (RUC), scheme has been included as part of all of the options. The decision to include RUC is based on the expectation that it will be needed to allow a ‘ Compact City’ option to fulfil its full sustainability potential. If RUC is included for one option then it should be included for all of the options, otherwise any differences between them may be due to RUC rather than the land use configuration and associated transport networks. It has therefore been decided to include RUC for all options because SOLUTIONS is a study of land use and transport, rather than road pricing. (There are insufficient resources to test the options both with and without RUC.)

The 2031 Tend both with, and without, RUC have identical land use inputs so that the effect of the RUC on travel and costs can be estimated within the model. This will inform the analysis by allowing the effect of the RUC with the model to be separated from the effects of the land use. (In reality, RUC would probably affect land use inputs due to planners choosing to allocate new dwellings closer to public transport, and some employers locating to where travel costs would be lower.) Therefore, the findings from the comparison of the Trend with and without RUC inform the assessment of the land use transport options, but the study does not aim to fully represent the actual likely effects of RUC.