Local Plans & Local Transport Plans: delivering better transport

We’ve been talking about parking in London for a while. Now we’re working with other CPRE branches to show why parking policies are key to saving our countryside, bringing back our buses, reviving town centres – and even contributing to solving the housing crisis.

• Saving our countryside. Car parks in England’s town and city centres are excellent locations for housing development. If we use them, it saves precious countryside. Town centre developments are better in many ways: they enable people to live near to shops, schools and amenities. They can support older people to avoid isolation. Housing can be built at higher density (gentle density, not tower blocks), meaning land is used more efficiently. At the same time, reducing the overall amount of car parking in a town encourages people to use the bus. Often towns have huge amounts of space given to surface car parking. Check out this Parkulator website to see how much there is in your area.
• Saving our buses. Availability of car-parking is a major determinant of travel mode and over-provision undermines the financial viability and attractiveness of public transport and active travel. Too much parking, especially low-cost parking, starts a negative feedback loop, reducing demand for public transport as more people drive, but also as bus service reliability and attractiveness falls due to rising traffic. This causes cuts to public transport, further undermining services, creating more traffic and pressure for more car-parking space. Those without access to a car have their opportunities reduced as their mobility is curtailed. Therefore, managing car-parking is essential to creating equitable places.
• Reviving our town centres. The dominance of car parking and traffic makes town centres unattractive places. Evidence shows people are more likely to stay longer and spend more money where places are attractive. Historic towns often benefit from a visitor economy which can be an important driver of employment and income locally. But this too can be undermined where the town is unattractive. Town centres, and their economies, can be improved by removing traffic and parking. Living Streets’ Pedestrian Pound is a good source of evidence.
• Delivering affordable housing. Many town centre car parks are owned by local authorities. Using these sites for development makes building affordable housing more financially viable – for two reasons. Primarily this is because they do not have to pay for the land. But also, infrastructure costs are much less compared to greenfield development, where power, water and road infrastructure all need to be paid for.

RESOURCES FOR LOCAL BRANCH CAMPAIGNERS

• Parking and Vision Based Transport March 2025 – draft for consultation Local Plan Policies / Local Transport Plan policies aimed at delivering outcomes for all. DRAFT for consultation. Comments to alice@cprelondon.org.uk by 14 April 2025.
• Parking Policies for Local Plans and LTPs April 2025 presentation by Alice Roberts at webinar with CPRE Transport Policy group, April 2025.
• Maximum Parking Standards – Local Plan Policies – Examples March 2025 Examples of positive parking policies in Local Plans around England collated in March 2025
• Developments on car parks – Case Studies March 2025 Developments on car parks in towns around England (mainly visuals, with some information).

Evidence: Parking availability, parking pricing and car use

1. Overview of research on the relationship between parking availability and private car use, Oxfordshire County Council, October 2022. This summarises findings from global academic research on parking provision, over the past ten years. “Restrictive parking policies can be a useful tool to influence travel behaviours, importantly noting that this is implemented in the context of a comprehensive approach, which includes the spatial strategy of development, improvements to public transport and active mode connectivity, amongst other factors that can be influenced by planning policy.”
2. Reducing car use through parking policies: an evidence review, ClimateXchange, 2023. This large evidence review for the Scottish Government summarises international studies and literature on how certain parking policies affect car use. Among the findings are that car-free developments have been found to have car use levels at less than half of city-wide averages, while parking located 50 metres or more from dwellings was associated with 25% fewer car trips.
3. Climate Smart Parking Policies, Local Government Association, 2020. Up to 75% of traffic volume is people driving around looking for car spaces.
4. ‘Just the Ticket’, Transport Planning Society, 2023. How current parking practice inadvertently promotes car ownership and use, and proposed solutions.
5. Parking facilities and the built environment: Impacts on travel behaviour, Science Direct, Christiansen et al, 2017. This focuses mainly on cities and workplace parking.
6. Nottingham Workplace Parking Levy – Transport Action Network 2022. Some of the improvements funded by the Workplace Parking Levy introduced in 2012 were: doubling the existing tram system (the tram network now has 50 stops – pre-pandemic, 20 million trips a year were made on a tram); the tram network serves 20 of the 30 largest employers in Nottingham; Rail Station redevelopment – leading it to become the busiest station in the East Midlands.
7. The High Cost of Free Parking (Donald Shoup), 2010 – free parking is not free, it is subsidised by non car owners, businesses and pushes up the price of land.
8. Your local Parking Finance Report – e.g. Dorset County Council Parking Services Annual Report shows the total expenditure and income. Any surplus must be spent on transport and is used by a number of councils to support e.g. bus concessionary fares (though in this case, Dorset used the £6m surplus in 2022/23 to “to maintain Dorset Council car parks, this includes cyclical vegetation maintenance work, lighting inspections and improvements and surface and relining works. Surplus has also been used to support work carried out across the highways network.” This compares to £3.3m bus grant funding for 2025/26. The parking surplus could have been redirected to support public transport.

Evidence: Density and transport

• Double the density, halve the land needed CPRE London, 2019. This has lots of images of what different densities look like.
• Ten reasons higher density living is good for communities CPRE London 2022. This also contains more links to further reading on benefits of density.
• The implications of Housing Density, by Graham Towers. P151. ‘The reduced cost of servicing, and the efficient use of public transport begin to take effect at densities as low as… 62 dwellings per hectare (100 people per acre).’ Typical Victorian terraces are around 75 per hectare. Barcelona and Paris are more than double the density of London.
• Stepping Off the Road to Nowhere, Create Streets and Sustrans, 2024. Between 2006-2012, 22,000 hectares of green space was lost to new development, predominantly housing. If new developments averaged just 50 homes per hectare (only three quarters of the density of typical Victorian suburban housing) we could have built nearly 50,000 more homes on the same land. If they had been built at typical Victorian densities of 75 homes per hectare, over 100,000 homes could have been built on the same land’ p26. How to use ‘gentle density’ of housing and vision-led sustainable transport to create a new development outside Chippenham.

Locating new development: car dependency

• ONS car ownership statistics. What proportion of households in your area do NOT have a car? Older and young people, and those on low incomes are less likely to own a car and are significantly disadvantaged where car dependency has undermined public transport. Often this problem also impacts ‘one-car’ households, where the car is used by one member of the household for work, leaving others unable to get around.
• Trapped Behind The Wheel, New Economics Foundation, 2024. More developments are being built on rural land and green belt: In 2010, 17% of new houses in England were built in rural areas, but by 2023 it was 26%. In the South West, this rose from 28% to 41%. These are usually on greenbelt land, creating sprawl in ‘donut’ form such as (Milton Keynes) or ‘cowpat’, sprawled in the country, away from amenities.
• What is being built in 2025? Transport for New Homes, 2025. Of more than 30 new housing developments that were built in 2024, the majority are car-dependent.
• Checklist to determine how car dependent a new development will be: Transport For New Homes:
• Convenient Town Centre living in every town – how councils are starting to promote development on car parks. Transport for New Homes 2025
• Planning Less Car Use. Friends of The Earth, 2019. Study of current developments from 2012-2017 show they are built far away from transport, (>2km), and at a low density of 32 dwellings per hectare, half the minimum considered viable to support public transport (bus) provision.

Bus use and accessibility

• Bus Users UK has a very useful compendium of research and reports on bus use and statistics
• Decarbonising transport: The Role of Buses, Local Government Association, 2020. Lower carbon emissions of buses vs cars.
• Increasing bus patronage through an audience strategy: Bus segmentation report, DfT, 2023. Government report on how to increase bus patronage by identifying six demographic segments that might use buses. Among the findings: reliability and convenience are the main factors that can be improved, most frequent users are under 35, ethnic minorities, and in London (where bus service is good and regulated). Quote: “cars are highly prevalent and a key driver of bus usage, significant intervention is required to push away from cars, and pull towards the bus”, p23. Also Bus Market Segmentation Report.
• Making the case for buses, a toolkit for local planners, Bus Centre of Excellence, Nov 2024

Carparking and space

• RAC Motoring FAQs. There are 34 million cars in the UK. 25% are parked overnight on the street, taking up a lot of space. Cars are parked 96% of the time. One in six households does not have a car.
• ONS Car ownership 2020 census data: % of households with no car or van, by Local Authority district, 2021
• Government owned car parks could hold they key to 110,000 new homes, Knight Frank, 2020. There are 103,000 public and private surface car parks across England, which comprise a land area of 20,000 hectares. Some 7,555 hectares are owned by the public sector, enough for 2.1 million homes.
• Collaborative Mobility UK, Car Club Annual Report UK 2023. Car clubs free up space and reduce car ownership. One car replaces between 14 and 32 private cars, the equivalent of 132 hectares of space that was occupied by parked cars that is freed for other uses.

Other tools:

• Parkulator mapping tool: calculates the % of an area that is covered by carparks, or brownfield land, and how many homes could be built on it.
• Pedestrianising town centres is good for business. Investing in making town centres walkable generates more money than the same investment in cars. The Pedestrian Pound, Living Streets

Building affordable homes/active travel

• Stepping Off The Road To Nowhere, Create Streets and Sustrans 2024. Case study in Chippenham shows how better quality, more sustainable, more attractive and more value-enhancing approaches to transport and development can cost the same or less than the dominant road-centric model.

Healthy planning – active travel

• Local Government Association – tools to empower councils to lead in developing healthy places.