PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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effective transport planning and policy making without adequate information and
assessment on the specific expected land-use impacts of a planned transportation
investment. Yet while many of the transport benefits are expected to be immediate
benefits, effects from changes in the land use structure only accrue over the medium to
long term. Moreover, direct and indirect effects need to be differentiated. Previous
assessment procedures never captured these effects, but many sophisticated new models
and methodologies have been developed under the EU’s 4 th and 5 th Framework programs
that successfully include spatial, long-term, and indirect effects. Now the EU needs to
ensure that these additional tools are further refined and finally applied in practice. 3
10.4.6 Strengthen Local Planning and Land Use Regulations
There is a clear need to significantly strengthen local planning and land use
regulations in order to counteract the tendencies for sprawling land uses next to bypass
exits and intersections. In particular, large-scale international road infrastructure
investments in major urban regions should not be approved without a consistent regional
development plan. The key problem with curbing ex-urban sprawl is that both inside and
outside the EU, almost all regional development bodies lack the legal decision-making
authority to successfully arbitrate between the incongruent development interest of major
cities and their surrounding communities, let alone successfully protect suburban green
3 Note that for the TENs, the SASI model is presently being updated under the EU’s 5 th Framework Project
IASON (http://www.inro.tno.nl/iason/). The project “Socio-Economic and Spatial Impacts of Transport
Infrastructure Investments and Transport System Improvements” (SASI)
aimed at the development of a comprehensive and transferable methodology for forecasting the
socioeconomic and spatial impacts of large transport investments in Europe, in particular of different
scenarios of the development of the trans-European transport networks (TETN) planned by the
European Commission. With respect to the cohesion objective of the European Union the model was to
answer the question which regions of the European Union are likely to benefit from the TETN and
which regions are likely to be disadvantaged.
See http://irpud.raumplanung.uni-dortmund.de/irpud/pro/sasi/sasi.htm