Impartial spectator or guilty bystander: The role of the transport planning professional in the improvement of community wellbeing

In transport planning, the classical 'predict and provide' paradigm is increasingly accompanied, or even substituted, by more wellbeing-oriented paradigms. This shift has the consequence that planners need to formulate visions and policy objectives that are multidimensional across different life domains. Using the rough-cut subdivision by Van Wee (health, safety, living environment and accessibility), it becomes clear that policies will have to trade off gains and losses across these domains in order to establish a (sufficientarian) equilibrium that complies to the core values of a society.

Apart from the political debates concerning those values, professionals in the field also have explicit and implicit standards that can help to further define how these trade-offs work and how they use this in practice. Using the survey results from a Dutch inquiry into sufficient accessibility and wellbeing objectives, we have analysed the dimensions of wellbeing that apply to the field of transport planning. This gives an insight in the relative importance of the four 'larger' dimensions (pair wise), as well as the type of objectives that professionals find important within each dimension.

The pairwise comparison shows that professionals value safety, health and the living environment structurally higher than accessibility. Reversely, safety is consiered slightly more important than the other dimensions. The analysis within the objectives shows that health is mainly connected to the promotion of active mobility, that the living environment consists of a heterogeneous set of objectives, and that safety is mainly connected to reducing the risk of traffic fatalities. For accessibility, professionals mainly point to a sufficientarian account of this dimension: providing enough accessibility to activities that people have reason to value.

Assuming that transport planning professionals can be considered to be well-informed 'impartial observers' within a sufficientarianist view, these insights can help to depoliticise the debates that often are associated with transport planning activities