Building consensus, decarbonisation and bringing communities with us at the Local Transport Summit

As our industry hits the headlines in a way that we haven’t seen for decades there were perhaps a few obvious talking points at the Local Transport Summit this week, sponsored by Steer and the Urban Transport Group, and hosted by South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority.

While the ‘war on the motorist,’ the cancellation of HS2 and low-traffic neighbourhoods all featured prominently both from speakers on stage and in conversation at our evening networking dinner, it wasn’t all bad news.

Sheffield was the perfect setting to create an upbeat atmosphere to discuss not just the challenges our industry (and the world) faces but also pragmatic solutions to create a better future.

The summit included an engaging walking tour, where we were able to see the benefits of the “Greater Green” scheme which is rejuvenating Sheffield city centre, providing improved biodiversity, natural urban drainage, and much needed green and play spaces and active travel routes for Sheffield residents and visitors.  

Over two days of stimulating discussion and lively networking, four key messages emerged to inspire us until the summit next year.

Collaborate to succeed: Working together can achieve huge returns. This means not only engaging in whole system thinking but also cross-sector collaboration. Transport planners should work alongside public health officials, businesses, civic institutions and community engagement partners (to name a few) to achieve our goals and maximise the benefits of transport investment for everyone.

New voices, new ideas: To paraphrase one attendee “the most interesting people at these summits are the ones who aren’t transport planners.” We heard from many new entrants into our field from areas as disparate as the nuclear industry and marketing, these fresh perspectives are valuable in challenging orthodoxy and breaking our profession out of its echo chamber. If every LTS is the same people with the same talking points, how do we expect to change things?

Focus on the needs of people from the start: We need to stop treating people as the problem and instead work hard to solve their problems. Truly listening to and understanding the needs residents and businesses we serve as planners is key if we want to delivery both a better travel experience and achieve wider impacts, such as improving air quality through modal shift.

Storytelling is the key: What is a 15-minute neighbourhood? To many people it simply reflects their childhood street where they could walk to school, cycle to the shops and their children could safely play outside. New terminology runs the risk that the myriad benefits for residents our schemes offer will get lost in translation. As planners we need to become (or engage) storytellers that can help us to work with communities, ensuring our message is always foremost in our implementation.

We’d like to thank all our speakers, attendees and Local Transport Today as well as our venue Kenwood Hall in Sheffield.

“I was delighted to be involved in shaping the agenda for this year’s Local Transport Summit, working with Landor, DfT, Urban Transport Group and the other sponsors to create an event that I hope gave the attendees fresh inspiration and motivation for the crucial work we do as transport professionals,” says Nicola Kane, Director at Steer.  

“All our speakers were fantastically engaging and the whole event had great energy and optimism, despite the challenging context we’ve been working in over recent weeks.”