Transport, economic development, and spatial planning from an EU perspective: Dominic Stead looks at recent EU developments concerning both the decoupling of transport growth and economic growth and the introduction of sustainable urban transport plans, and considers their implications for spatial planning.(special issue: european spatial planning)

Town and Country Planning, March, 2005 by Stead, Dominic

TWO RELATIVELY new concepts from recent European policy documents are examined in this article: the decoupling of transport growth and economic growth, and sustainable urban transport plans. Both have potentially important implications for land use planning.

The European Union's Strategy for Sustainable Development, A Sustainable Europe for a Better World, was published in May 2001 as the European Commission's proposal to the Gothenburg European Council to be held in June 2001. One of the headline objectives of this document is to "decouple transport growth significantly from growth in gross domestic product in order to reduce congestion and other negative side-effects of transport'. The objective was subsequently taken on board in the conclusions of the...

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