Triple Access Planning for Uncertain Futures - A Handbook for Practitioners

A consortium of five academic institutions across Europe have published a new guide to enabling future transport planning centred on spatial proximity, physical mobility and digital connectivity, entitled “Triple Access Planning for Uncertain Futures – A Handbook for Practitioners”. This was prepared under the 'Triple Access Planning for Uncertain Futures' project, funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and as part of JPI Urban Europe’s ERA-NET Urban Accessibility and Connectivity (ENUAC) initiative.

Although recent shifts have led to greater emphasis on transport planning being vision-led and focused on people rather than traffic, conventional sustainable urban mobility planning still relies on forecast-led (‘predict’) methods, which have failed to alleviate congestion and deliver on economic, social and environmental goals.

To tackle this, the ‘Triple Access Planning for Uncertain Futures’ consortium have introduced a new approach to transport planning called Triple Access Planning (TAP). TAP includes digital connectivity, increasingly important in the digital age, alongside physical mobility and spatial proximity as the ‘three pillars’ of accessibility (or ‘triple access’). The new approach aims to replace the ‘predict and provide’ paradigm of conventional planning with a vision-led ‘decide and provide’ paradigm. The vision-led TAP planning approach establishes a “preferred future for accessibility” supporting social, economic and environmental goals, and determines the potential pathways to achieve it informed by uncertainties in the future.

The Triple Access Planning for Uncertain Futures – A Handbook for Practitioners is a companion guide for transport planners which explains the triple access perspective on planning, the handling of uncertainty, addressing access for goods, and the organisational and institutional challenges associated with 'Triple Access Planning'.

Throughout the guide, four planning phases are examined, namely:

1. the reasoning behind the approach (“Philosophy”);
2. assessing the current and future situations (“Preparation and Analysis”);
3. determining the vision, goals and strategic approach to achieve these (“Strategy Development”); and
4. identifying specific implementations to achieve the goals (“Measure Planning”).

The Triple Access System is an opportunity to support urban and rural living in ways which assist economic activity and social justice, and are compatible with a need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The full handbook or a standalone summary can be accessed and downloaded on the publication website here: Triple access planning for uncertain futures - A handbook for practitioners. The summary document is also available to download in Dutch, French, Italian, Slovenian and Swedish.

An introductory 15-minute video presentation on the TAP handbook is also available here.

More information about TAP can be found on the consortium's website here: Triple Access Planning for Uncertain Futures (tapforuncertainty.eu