Professor Edgar Morgenroth:

I totally agree with the Deputy that compact residential development is just one dimension. If people live far away from where they do their other activities, there will be what transport engineers call trip generation. At least if development is compact, we have a bigger chance of moving people towards public transport. There is a benefit even if we do not achieve the spatial match terribly well. This goes back to the earlier discussion on transport-orientated growth. We need to think about that match between activities. When it comes to transport, commuting is only a smaller fraction of a whole. It is the other activities that generate more trips. We must think about how we link up those elements. If we are building compact developments without shopping, social and other kinds of facilities, we will generate more traffic. We need to look at the issue as a whole. Again, that is where the national planning framework comes in. If it does not cover that well and ensure the right decisions are achieved at the local authority level, where a lot of the relevant decisions are taken, then we have a problem.

Going back to an earlier point raised by the Chairman, a really important consideration is that with any decision, whether to build a house, apartment block or whatever, once it is there, it is there for a long time.

This is one of the reasons our transport problems are hard to solve. Patterns take an awfully long time to unwind. Every time we make a bad decision in one particular development, we will be stuck with that for a long time. That makes it even harder to achieve our targets. We must have taken some poor decisions in the past.