TRICS Consortium Limited are pleased to announce the publication of our Guidance Note on the Practical Implementation of the Decide and Provide Approach for future development planning, which is freely downloadable from our website at http://www.trics.org/decideandprovideguidance.html.
This document is the result of a broad and thorough collaborative effort from different planning perspectives, including members of the TRICS team, local highway authorities, the academic profession, the Department of Transport and independent consultants. Now, more than ever, we need to reassess approaches to transport and development planning, and the collaboration behind this project has allowed us to present the idea of the new Decide and Provide approach, whilst also providing strong evidence, using the wealth of historic survey data within TRICS, of trip generation trends over time, which themselves illustrate that the principles behind this new approach are grounded in hard data. It has become clear from our analyses that there has been a reduction in vehicular trip generation over time for key land uses, and that we should adapt the TRICS system and introduce new elements into its analytical features to allow a new type of trend interrogation of the database, whilst keeping TRICS a vital and integral part of assessing future trip generation estimates.
For over 30 years TRICS has been instrumental in our planning processes, and as an organisation we are very pleased to be playing our own important role, along with our collaborative partners, in addressing one of the most important questions in transport and development planning today. The work that has been undertaken has shown that TRICS will continue to be a fundamental element of the new Decide and Provide approach. We have always been an organisation that can adapt and evolve over time and participate in addressing important issues with the experience of our team in trip generation analysis, data collection programmes, system development and research, and forward thinking. We are ready and willing to make the necessary changes and to show our users how TRICS could be used alongside the new Decide and Provide approach, providing essential guidance which has started with the publication of this document. We need to make it clear that publication of this document should be regarded as the first stage of this journey. There is plenty more work to do, and we look forward to more of our users and other organisations coming on board to join our growing collaboration towards a new future for development planning that aims to face the industry’s (and the nation’s) challenges head on with positive solutions.
There will be a great need for a new environmental approach as we emerge from the pandemic, especially when it comes to the decarbonisation of transport. We live in an uncertain world, and the question of uncertainty can clearly be extended to transportation and the future of development planning. The new Decide and Provide approach embraces that uncertainty, and offers a clear and distinct method for how the practices of our industry should and can change, and TRICS intends to be leading the way in terms of providing practical and solid survey data analysis solutions. Through an extended period of discussion, data analysis and application of ideas that are firmly rooted in the challenges that lay ahead, we can all implement a new forward-thinking approach to development planning and Transport Assessments fit for the 21st Century.
We look forward to receiving your much welcomed feedback and to working with you all in making these changes happen.