A PATH OUT OF THE WILDERNESS

Abstract

This paper deals with the activity of transport planning. Transport planning is a specialized subset of the more general activity of urban and regional planning. However, while the land use side of urban and regional planning has struggled, somewhat introspectively, with theories of planning, transport planning has paid significantly more attention to theories in planning. In large part this is a natural consequence of the discipline's strong intersection with engineering. The rationalist, objective techniques that underlie the activity of transport planning as we have seen it develop historically since the 1960s, are to do with the city as a machine. The implication is that it can be modelled, predicted, manipulated. It is also this intersection with engineering which gave transport planning a significantly more durable and clearly defined core of technique when compared to its cousin discipline, land use planning. (A)