This reflective piece discusses the experience of an upper tier authority officer when trying to approach road space reallocation in rural and urban locations.
What is the challenge?
Road space reallocation functions by reducing the need to build additional highway infrastructure for sustainable modes of transport (e.g., segregated cycle lanes, bus lane priority measures), instead repurposing the existing highway infrastructure (road space) to accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, buses, trams for example alongside vehicles, effectively taking back road space from vehicles to accommodate other sustainable modes of transport on the existing road network, where possible.
Road space reallocation has the benefits of reducing ‘embodied carbon’ emissions associated with the building of additional highway infrastructure (all emissions from construction, building, maintaining), prioritising sustainable modes of transport over the car and bringing forward transport decarbonisation in terms of value for money within a funding gap that is unlikely to see investment on the scale required to meet the national target to be net zero by 2050.
As a result of the action learning set programme what actions will you now take to address the challenge?
The most important action taken away from this LGA Learning Action Set in summary is to learn how best to sell the benefits from a local stakeholder perspective.
- Understanding stakeholders fully can lead to successful engagement – therefore framing the benefits associated to the project in terms of your audience, so that you are better able to counter opposition and approach stakeholder engagement from a stronger stance. Win hearts and minds.
- Sharing information on the benefits and bringing stakeholders along with you, especially those with the greatest ability to promote and defend the benefits on behalf of a project.
Framing the benefits of road space reallocation benefits also requires national policy input and commitment to reduce ‘embodied carbon’, which must go further than just recognition in the published transport decarbonisation plan.
Stakeholders are currently opposed to road space reallocation, they can only see the dis-benefits to motorists in terms of the costs related exclusively to vehicle delay and congestion, supported by national transport appraisal analysis (WebTAG) business case development for major schemes. At a local level, support for the benefits of increased use of the existing road network has found strong opposition at a neighbourhood level in some cases, so that discussion can be blocked by the reduction of on-street parking or congestion from the get go.
Thus, framing the benefits to transport decarbonisation is difficult to convey over the dis-benefits from the start. It is critical to overcome the greatest challenge to successful stakeholder engagement for sustainable transport projects where road space reallocation is required, we need to prevent the dis-benefits and issues of reputation overtaking the benefits that causes the failure of a project from the start.
As a result of the action learning set programme what actions will you now take to address the challenge?
The most important action taken away from this LGA Learning Action Set in summary is to learn how best to sell the benefits from a local stakeholder perspective.
- Understanding stakeholders fully can lead to successful engagement – therefore framing the benefits associated to the project in terms of your audience, so that you are better able to counter opposition and approach stakeholder engagement from a stronger stance. Win hearts and minds.
- Sharing information on the benefits and bringing stakeholders along with you, especially those with the greatest ability to promote and defend the benefits on behalf of a project.
How will you look to sustain the approach in the long term?
Without a national commitment to reduce ‘embodied carbon’, it will fall to local authorities to frame the co-benefits of road space reallocation from a local perspective, taking stakeholders along a journey to net zero. Without national policy guidance, local authorities will look to learn from best practice.
Lessons learned
Action Learning Sets outputs aim to provide a framework for peer to peer group learning in a non-judgmental way. It is a technique that could be used for exploring challenges and reaching solutions that require thinking outside the standard approach, gaining insight from different disciplines for example, to open avenues to find a new approach or method to problem solve.