Planning of National Transport Infrastructure
In the Islamic Countries
14
vehicle ownership and dependency (He and Thøgersen, 2017, Buehler et al., 2017) and through
heavy congestion charging (Sugiarto et al., 2017, Munford, 2017, Olsson and Davis, 2017). Thus,
transport policy in developed countries has become one driven by reducing demand rather than
the reverse, that is to say building to satisfying increasing demand… and this is significant. The
economic and technical aspects of this are covered in subsequent sections of this review.
2.2.3. Sustainable Development
Ultimately sustainability is driving the contemporary transport policy agenda (Schiller et al.,
2010). The impact on transport policy is for it to be driven thematically and horizontally to
ensure that transport is the servant of the economy and not its master. The old thinking of being
vertically driven by its various modes is very useful for developing countries where building up
the transport resource is the priority, but not for those with developed transport systems.
Horizontal themes may relate to employment generation (Porter, 2014), environmental
protection (Bueno et al., 2015), health and safety (Choi et al., 2017) and technology and research
(Kottari et al., 2017). For the transport policies of 2050, the impact on the internet of things will
be profound, from autonomous vehicles (Fagnant and Kockelman, 2015) to telecommuting
(Hirte and Tscharaktschiew, 2015). With perplexing yet-to-be-answered questions that impact
on the very nature of transport, land use, employment and even the city region, is it possible to
make the right decisions today?
2.2.4. Conclusions
It is apparent that transport policy becomes more relevant to countries with developed
transport systems than those that are developing them. This reality leads one to conclude that
matters of efficiency and not development, are drivers of policy making. Principle amongst
issues of efficiency is that of integration. There is possibly a simple explanation for this and that
is the more complex transport becomes, the greater the need for a more holistic and policy
driven approach. Possibly, countries may have also experienced that mistakes could have been
avoided, if planning was driven more by policy than by politicians. The story of transport policy
and planning, its genesis and relevance is well explained by Garrison and Levinson (2014) who
draw lessons from especially the USA and UK. The authors set out to demonstrate that the ‘story
of transportation policy can tell us what transportation, is, does, and might do in the future, and
at an even broader level, how society has learned to create, deliver, and operate large,
complicated systems.
The need for transport policy is entirely because transport provision has moved well beyond
the simple building of roads and railways that cater for ever increasing volumes of traffic, to
providing accessibility through the application of complex integrated and highly managed
systems of infrastructure and communications. To illustrate and exemplify this point, listed in
Appendix 1 is a selection of the main drivers of contemporary transport policy, these are
organized by sector and then by sub-sector (Rasbash, 2011). Through those main drivers and
indeed other transport policies, the context and relevance of the transport plan is established.
Having said that, while the policies are contemporary they are driven by neo-classical theory,
that is to say that performance drives choice. But the performance of transport, be it price, time,
comfort and safety, is not the only criterion that influences demand. Issues of sustainability have
become mainstreamed, as maximizing traffic has been replaced by maximising mobility which