Planning for Engineers and Surveyors

225 Pages·1981·3.926 MB·English

by  F. D. Hobbs and J. F. Doling (Auth.)

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PLANNING FOR ENGINEERS
AND SURVEYORS
F. D. HOBBS, Dip.Civ.Eng., M.I.C.E., I.H.E., A.M.I.T.
Former Head Environmental Modelling and Survey Unit
and
J. F. DOLING, B.A., M.sc, ph.D.
Lecturer, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies,
University of Birmingham, England
PERGAMON PRESS
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FEDERAL REPUBLIC Pergamon Press GmbH, 6242 Kronberg-Taunus,
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Copyright © 1981 F. D. Hobbs and J. F. Doling
AJJ Eights Reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
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ing, recording or otherwise, without permission in
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First edition 1981
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hobbs, Frederick Derek
Planning for engineers and surveyors. -
(Pergamon international library).
1. Regional planning
2. Cities and towns - Planning
I. Title II. Doling, J
309.2 HT391 8041553
ISBN 0-08-025459 4 Hard cover
ISBN 0-O8-O25458 6 Flexicover
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FOREWORD
In the buoyant early 1960s, whilst a Senior Lecturer in the Birmingham School of
Planning, I had the pleasure of working together with Derek Hobbs on joint study
projects for post graduate planning and engineering students. The time was one of
optimism about the future, belief in economic growth and development, belief in the
creative contribution of urban planning and civic engineering. The land use/tran-
sport planning phase had been heralded by Rapkin's work on 'Traffic as a function
of Land-Use1. Birmingham was itself a demonstration project of the 'new thinking'
- the opening of the Bull Ring Centre - as a prime concept of 'traffic architecture',
the near completion of the Manzoni-Borg Inner Ring Road, and the assumption that
everyone would find private mobility via use of that 'mixed blessing' the motor car.
Some thirteen years later, when I renewed contact with Derek, by joining the staff
of Birmingham University, the context for transport planning had changed fundamen-
tally. It is that changed contextual background, and related determinants to which
I would like to refer in this introduction. May I first though welcome the pro-
duction of this timely and useful book, paying my personal tribute to its late
initiating author, Derek Hobbs, and to say how pleased I am that my colleague
Dr John Doling, has followed this project through to fruition.
As we enter the 1980s, we need to consider how the contextual determinants for
planning and transport planning differ from those of the heyday of the 1960s.
Certainly then, society was busily investing in infrastructure generally and road
systems particularly, graduate entry into these specific professional fields was
being expanded, an assumption was made that car ownership and access would grow -
almost indefinitely, and a continuing supply of cheap fuel was taken for granted.
The 1973 Energy Crisis was a catalyst for changing many things, starting new
scenarios about energy-conservation, but also linking to ecological criteria,
linking to later low-growth and even zero-growth economic and demographic concepts.
The earlier publication of Colin Buchanan's seminal report on 'Traffic in Towns'
had introduced parameters of costs in relation to environmental quality standards,
aimed at making coherent a new conventional wisdom that had its origins in the pre-
war writings of Alker Tripp.
Recalling now the phase of Motorway Design competitions, and my fruitful associ-
ation with an Australian friend, Ian Morrison, who devised the notion of 'environ-
mental area', in the 'New Ways for London' project, it is sobering to realise how
many planning and societal assumptions which were then taken for granted, today
have no validity. For instance, we all now take for granted the political nature
of the planning process, but we did not do so even fifteen years ago. The writings
of Gans, of Pahl, and of Eversley are now equally familiar to the transport planner
v
vi Foreword
and the town and country planner· Thus the redistributive effect of land use
planning decisions, the apportionment of benefits and losses arising from develop-
ment generally, and from transport infrastructure and accessibility specifically,
has transferred from sociological and economic literature into mainstream planning
practice and application. The political nature of planning, and the fact that we
cannot even take its social utility for granted is all too evident at the present
time, with the most fundamental of planning changes being proposed by Michael
Heseltine, the Secretary of State for the Environment·
Limits of financial resources, competition for a share of constrained public sector
budgets, changing energy costs, and changing social needs oblige us now to clarify
our priorities in planning. How far is planning to be comprehensive, or to act on
behalf of groups at risk? How far should welfare considerations weight its actions?
Questions of modal split, are not just technical but also social and economic
issues. Working visits in the past to countries such as the USA and Yugoslavia
have illustrated these questions for me very graphically. In Detroit 'Motown1,
freeway-building, market growth forces, and ineffective remedial action in the
inner city, has led to a model of a polarised city with environmental quality,
high mobility and high energy consumption found in the outer urban areas. Inner
areas of captive populations, skewed demographic and ethnic composition, low
environmental standards and of relative immobility, may be noted in an urban area
which relies on private mobility, but 23% of the population does not have access
to car transport. Economic, and demographic factors' importance became all too
evident in such situations, as do the needs for effective interaction of transport
and land use planning, let alone of other forms of intervention.
In Yugoslavia I was further reminded of such basic issues in attending a present-
ation by American consultants about the transport planning of Zagreb. Attacks
were made on the abnormality of high percentages of pedestrian movements, the needs
to develop equally mass-trans it and private mobility. Social, cultural and econ-
omic factors and determinants, were leading to a type of planning which was as
much an imposed and alien system, as was the traffic planning by Haussman in Paris
about a century earlier. If planning is to be based on norms, standards, and
values, these have to be sensitively and thoughtfully rooted in the social, cul-
tural and economic determinants of the society which is generating that planning
activity.
Many years ago I discussed the ecology of cities with Derek Hobbs, and we shared
an interest in determinants which were social and ecological. The current re-
emergence of interest in Patrick Geddes and his ideas, linking sociology to biology
and ecology, is timely, as is the welcome appearance of this book, which I hope
will consolidate the knowledge of the stage we have reached in planning, and help
give clarity of direction for where we go next in the collaborative fields of
planning and transport planning.
Professor Tony Travis
Centre for Urban and Regional Studies
University of Birmingham
July 1980
PREFACE
This book was conceived by my late friend and colleague Derek Hobbs. An engineer
himself by original training, he had long realised the importance of an understand-
ing of the land use and transport planning context in which the work of engineers
and surveyors was carried out. Indeed much of his work at Birmingham was devoted
to the teaching of these subjects. He recognised that practicing engineers and
surveyors, even those working in local authorities, often do not understand what
local authority planners do. The suspicion and sometimes lack of co-operation
arising from this ignorance does nothing to help planning activities which are
fraught with numerous difficulties of their own. Derek therefore intended to
produce a textbook, addressed to municipal and civil engineers and surveyors, which
would explain what the planners of land use and transport did and, perhaps more
importantly, why. This meant describing the sort of problem with which the plan-
ner was faced, the reasons why they had emerged as well as the techniques used
to develop plans. It also meant describing the political as well as the technical
nature of planning.
At his untimely death Derek's plans were only partially complete. Rather than
allow his foresight and effort to be wasted it was agreed to my continuing and
completing the task. In this I have endeavoured to follow the outline to which
Derek had been working, to integrate my work with his, and generally to be faith-
ful to his concept of what the book should be attempting. I have had considerable
help and support from his widow and family. I hope that together we have achieved
some measure of success.
J Doling
July 1980
vü
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1 Growth of the UK gross national product 4
2.1 Howard's satellite cities 13
2.2 Interrelationships between the three levels of planning 16
2.3 The Standard regions 20
2.4 Suggested departmental structures for shire county 27
3.1 The components of population change 33
3.2 The birth rate for England and Wales 35
3.3 Employees by industrial sector 48
3.4 The British new towns 59
4.1 Road vehicles per head in Britain and USA, 1910-1970 74
4.2 Daily flow patterns 77
4.3 The transport gaps 81
4.4 Modal choice of persons entering the central area of
selected cities during the morning peak 83
5.1 The planning cycle 102
5.2 A goals compatability matrix 110
5.3 An option graph 118
6.1 Future shopping requirements using central place theory 154
6.2 The traditional transport demand methodology 159
6.3 The logistic curve model of the growth in car ownership 161
6.4 A trip distribution matrix 164
6.5 The structure of the Lowry model 167
7.1 Radburn layout 185
7.2 Devising one-way systems 192
8.1 The ladder of citizen participation 206
XII
Chapter 1
THE NATURE OF PLANNING AND PLANNERS
INTRODUCTION
This book is about what planners do, how they do it and why. It describes what
they spend their working hours doing, what their objectives are and what they are
attempting to produce. It is concerned with how they go about their work, what
methods and what stages are involved. In addition it discusses the framework
within which this activity is carried out, including both the legislative back-
ground and the social and economic problems and the issues which make planning
necessary. These matters are of interest because there is widespread misunder-
standing of the planner's functions and activities, not only by the public at
large, but also by members of related professions.
THE DEFINITION OF PLANNING
A plan can be many things. It can be a drawing on a two-dimensional surface show-
ing a building or a part of a town. Alternatively, it can be a scheme by which
something is to be achieved, done or arranged such as a bank robbery, the weekly
shopping trip or a business meeting. The act of making a plan, or planning, is
equally general: it is the act of designing, scheming or arranging anything which
is to happen in the future. Indeed any act of pre-arranging is, by definition,
planning. As such it is an activity practised universally by individuals and groups
within all societies. It ranges from ad hoc procedures adopted by the individual,
to highly sophisticated processes which have become central to international and
governmental agencies of all types. At one level, planning is a decision made, for
example, by the author in setting down the outline of the contents of each chapter
of this book to ensure that before writing commences the contents form a coherent
and comprehensive whole. Similarly, the reader may have planned to read the first
chapter on one occasion before going on to another planned activity. The reading
of the second chapter may then be planned for some definite or indefinite time in
the future. On another level, planning is the process by which the U.S. Government
allocates its many billion dollar budget in the manner which it anticipates will
provide an adequate defence of the nation in the event of nuclear attack. It is
also the activity which multinational corporations engage in as part of their con-
tinual quest to supply what the consumer wants and thus to make a reasonable profit
on its investment.
The subject of the planning that is described in this book is often referred to as
1
2 Planning for Engineers and Surveyors
town and country planning, land use planning, environmental planning, urban and
regional planning or physical planning. It also embraces the area of transport
planning. These terms all broadly refer to aspects of the same thing, (hereafter
the word "planning" will "be used to embrace them all) which is planning concerned
with the built environment and the activities of people in relation to it. This
is distinct from such activities as defence planning and industrial planning, but
often each field of planning enables the use of common techniques which are trans-
ferred, or applied, to the problem of another. One end result of the process of
planning is a physical representation often in the form of a plan of the built
environment set out as a spatial relationship of elements. Indeed, planning has
been narrowly defined as the activity of allocating the use of land and the siting
of buildings and communication routes with the objective of achieving a balance
between convenience, beauty and cost.
The underlying rationale of such definition is that activities and land uses are
spatially distributed at different locations. These locations range from those
which are specifically determined by, for example, geological characteristics, as
in the case of mines, to those which are almost randomly selected, as in the case
of houses. Clearly many land uses could be located in alternative ways with equal
suitability. The siting of an industry is a good illustration of some of the facts
which can influence location. In general terms some notion of profitability will
generally be the principal goal. However, this may be achieved by consideration
and resolution of a number of requirements: accessibility to markets, raw materi-
als, labour, components, machinery etc. The optimization of each of these require-
ments, independently of the other requirements might result in a number of differ-
ent optimum locations. The optimum location, when only raw materials are taken
into account, may be different to when only the availability of labour is taken
into account. The location problem is then one of different optimum locations.
The location problem is then one of resolving the claims of these different loca-
tions so that an overall optimization is achieved. When this sort of exercise is
increased to a multiplicity of uses, for example, houses, parks, factories, offices
and shops, then this is the concern of the land use planner who has to consider
not only the conflicting locational requirements within each land use type but also
the conflicts between each type. The same area of land, for example, might possibly
be used for various uses. The planner must also consider the important and influ-
ential role of transport and communications. Different land uses are, of necessity,
spatially separated and, for people to be able to partake in these separated acti-
vities, communication must exist between them. There will be little to be gained,
for example, from locating an industrial estate where it is inaccessible to the
homes of potential employees. At the same time, the forms of communication stimu-
late different uses and demands. The building of a new transport route may, for
example, make a previously undeveloped area attractive to housing developers by
virtue of its increased accessibility to urban influences. There is thus a con-
tinual interdependence between land use and transport which the planner has to
both recognise and utilize in his locational policies.
However, increasingly it has come to be realised that such definitions of planning
are too restrictive; that it is not the built environment - buildings and commu-
nication routes - itself which is of primary importance, but man. Therefore, any
attempt to practice land use planning in the absence of consideration of economic
and social issues, and planning will inevitably neglect to place the needs and
wellbeing of society in the forefront. Ultimately, planning must be about people
and for people, and not simply about convenience, beauty and cost although all
these things are of concern.
This is important because there is little doubt that the built environment has a
marked effect on attitudes and social behaviour and on the relative economic well-
being of individuals and groups. Decisions taken in almost all areas of planning
The Nature of Planning and Planners 3
have repercussions on the distribution of benefits and disbenefits across the com-
munity and these, in turn, have a range of social consequences· Modern planning
arose from an abhorrence of the social condition of the mass of people in nine-
teenth century Britain, resulting from the total inadequacies of the physical
environment· Multiple deprivation, the lack of basic facilities commonly accepted
as a standard or the means to enjoy them, are however, often to be found today
within the concentration of unemployed, low-paid workers and the aged residing in
bad housing, set among out-dated industry in the inner city areas. Poverty also
exists in the remoter rural areas, where lack of mains services, inadequate housing
and lack of transport or mobility lead to unsatisfactory conditions for some of the
population. Qnployment opportunities are essential, but the tendency has been for
the more highly productive factories to be built in the suburbs and for school
leavers in the inner areas to be largely unskilled. Assembly plants employing
wives are also often located away from the areas of greatest need. Thus the dis-
tribution of socio-economic groups by area has been steadily changing leaving be-
hind large areas of dereliction. Redevelopment has driven the poor to adjacent
areas, causing further cycles of decline, and many smaller enterprises have been
unable to secure replacement accommodation at suitable costs. Such deprivations
cause a downward spiral with succeeding generations trapped by disadvantage and
facing reducing opportunities, particularly as overall employment prospects are
limited by recession and population bulge. The decline of the economic base leads
to a bias in the distribution of social classes as the more educated, younger and
healthy populations move to the suburbs, leaving behind groups who have lost power,
status, income and leadership. Civic pride and motivation are lost in areas which
have a poor quality of home life, education, health, and recreational facilities.
Social and economic planning thus seeks to formulate social and economic policies
that overall determine community welfare, be it for small or large groups. Thus,
there is an interference in the operation of market forces which would otherwise
determine the shape of the built environment based on social needs of people as
well as economic criteria. However, although these social and economic issues are
clearly important in practice, there is not always a clear relationship with phys-
ical planning. This largely arises because different organizations and institu-
tions are involved in various facets of the overall planning of the country. For
example, many of the departments of Central Government, such as the Departments of
Health and Social Security, and Education, are responsible for carrying out and
administering legislation with social and economic objectives, and which have dir-
ect and far reaching social and economic effects. However, their influence on the
built environment may often be indirect and not particularly significant. This
book is not concerned with such social and economic planning matters themselves
but with the planning of the built environment to achieve certain social and econ-
omic objectives. That is, it is concerned with the activity of allocating the use
of land and ths siting of buildings and communication routes, but not simply with
objectives of convenience, beauty and cost. Social and economic criteria are of
particular importance.
However, in one significant way the nature of planning has changed during the last
decade. This has been a result of a fundamental changeover from Britain as a
country of growth to Britain as a country of stagnation. In this context growth
refers to growth of population, growth of public expenditure and growth in indus-
trial output. From the end of the second world war until the early part of the
nineteen seventies there was more or less continuous growth in all these things.
For example, in the twenty years from 1951 to 1971 the population of England and
Wales expanded by 12% from 43.8 millions to 48.9 millions. In these circumstances
the job of the planner was to aid the accommodation of this growth. He was con-
cerned with how and where this growth of population should be housed and his plans
contained such schemes as the development of new towns, the organized resettling
of people from the large cities to small towns and vast housing estates on the
periphery of existing settlements. Growth of the gross national product, expan-r