Tesco at Little Lever - Transport Assessment

Transport Impact Assessments

Here we will deal with the requirement, laid out in Government Guidance, for a planning application to be accompanied by a Traffic Impact Assessment.

There is a stipulation that a planning application for a food retail store such as a supermarket in excess of 800 sq metres must be accompanied by a Transport Assessment and a Travel Plan.

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Here we deal with the Transport Assessment.

Most of what is below is direct copy and paste from that Government Guidance.

Planning Policy Guidance Note 13: Transport (PPG13) states that, where a new development is likely to have significant transport implications, a Transport Assessment (TA) should be prepared and submitted with a planning application for the development.

A Transport Assessment is a comprehensive and systematic process that sets out transport issues relating to a proposed development. It identifies what measures will be taken to deal with the anticipated transport impacts of the scheme and to improve accessibility and safety for all modes of travel, particularly for alternatives to the car such as walking, cycling and public transport.

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To produce such a document Traffic Data particular to the roads immediately adjacent to and in the vicinity of the development needs to be collected.



The Guidance stipulates the conditions under which this data should be collected as follows:-

The assessment should include recent counts (normally surveyed within the last three years) for peak period turning movements at critical junctions.

The traffic data should reflect the normal traffic flow conditions on the transport network (e.g. non-school holiday periods, typical weather conditions etc.) in the vicinity of the site, and should be valid for the intended purposes.

The recommended periods for data collection are spring and autumn, which include the neutral months of April, May, June, September and October,

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The Guidance stipulates the periods during which data should be collected as follows:-

The analysis period should reflect the person trip generation characteristics of the proposed development, as well as conditions on the adjacent transport system. It should be related to known and anticipated peak patterns of demand both for the transport system and development-generated trips.

A TA should normally consider the following analysis periods:

• weekday morning and evening peak period trips for the adjacent transport system, with particular focus on the peak period traffic flows on the road network;

• weekday morning and evening peak period trips for the proposed development;

• an off-peak period selected to assess level of greatest change resulting from the development;

• weekend peak period if the development is anticipated to generate significant levels of new trips at weekends or the adjacent transport system suffers from greater levels of congestion than during weekdays.

The analysis period should also include an assessment of the combination of development related and non-development-related trips.

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The Guidance also addresses Environmental Issues and states that the Transport Assessment should address amongst other things the following matters.

• nuisance to people caused by transport-related noise and vibration generated by the development;

• the emission of greenhouse gases as a result of the transport implications of the development and the impact of changes in local air quality on people;


These are only short extracts from the Guidance.

More later