Plymouth City Council is required by law to produce and periodically update a Local Transport Plan (LTP) that sets out the city’s transport policies and an Implementation Plan that describes how these will be delivered.
Previously, Plymouth’s LTPs have been produced as stand-alone documents. However, in 2017 the council decided to integrate an update of its LTP in the production of its single, holistic Plymouth Plan and the Joint Local Plan. The city council’s up to date transport policies can therefore now be found in these two documents, which were adopted in March 2019.
The city council’s overall strategic principles for transport are set out in Policy SPT9 and are as follows:
- Sustainable growth as a key driver behind the transport strategy, whilst making sure that transport is delivered in the most health promoting and environmentally responsible manner.
- Focussing major growth on accessible locations, where high quality sustainable travel can be more effectively promoted, with clear priorities for routes to and from the city’s three Growth Areas to balance the competing demands for highway space.
- Managing the need to travel, by having a balanced distribution of land use within the city and towns.
- Seeking to reduce the impact of severance caused by transport networks, enabling more journeys by walking, cycling and public transport and providing genuine alternative ways to travel from home to work and other facilities.
- Providing realistic sustainable transport choices and increasing the integration of transport modes so that people have genuine alternative ways to travel.
- Getting the most out of existing transport networks, through measures that improve network efficiency and encourage behavioural change, with major infrastructure projects only where there are no better alternatives.
- Supporting economic and housing growth with major transport infrastructure projects where there are proven benefits, so that transport links are not a barrier to planned development and pinch points on the network are alleviated.
- Adopting a hierarchy of transport modes and routes based upon different spatial settings.
- Delivering transport projects which provide a safe and effective transport system, as well as supporting place shaping and healthy community objectives, as guided by the hierarchy.
- Taking local control of our transport future, embracing localism, generating independent resources to transform transport investment, and embracing changes in travel technology.
- Partnership working, with local and regional partners, realising greater benefits over the life of the plan and beyond.
An updated transport LTP Implementation Plan setting out how these transport policies will be delivered is currently under development.