The History of Transport Planning

Abstract

This chapter describes how transport planning is a relatively new component of transport policy. For most of recorded history, transport has been an individual process, self-motivated and self-managed. Some group travel arose when people found it useful to bond together into tribal units and freight travel occurred when man used domesticated animals to carry marketable goods. As armies grew in size, mass travel by troops became significant, and their need for supplies, reinforcements, and messages created the need for regular transport services. The first transport planning probably occurred within the logistics component of these armies. Once the armies had completed their task, conquered lands required transport for administration and the return of booty and taxation. As a technology and as a service, transport developed slowly and was rarely able to perform significantly better than the private efforts of individuals. This paper discusses how the successes of transport planning in the past have been associated with understanding travel behavior and modeling and predicting that behavior. This has resulted in good incremental developments and increasingly wise policy decisions. The transport planning process, once the data are collected and the model predictions become available, is a search for possible solutions and a prioritizing of those solutions.

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