In 1990 a consortium of the Scottish Development Department, Lothian Regional Council and Edinburgh District Council commissioned The MVA Consultancy to conduct a study of potential transport strategies for Edinburgh for the year 2010. The study was completed in under a year. This timescale was achieved by developing a strategic sketch-planning model, which enabled the performance of alternative strategies to be tested against a range of objectives and in the context of different scenarios for future development. A range of novel evaluation measures was developed, including a procedure for combining the issues of cost-benefit analysis and financial feasibility
The study considered a wide range of transport policy measures, including road and light rail infrastructure, traffic and environmental management, parking supply, park-and-ride, public transport service levels, fares, parking charges and road user charging. It demonstrated the contribution of each of these to achievement of the transport policy objectives and the added benefits of combining infrastructure, management and pricing measures
The Paper presents the objectives and structure of the study. It describes the sketch planning model developed and the ways in which this was used to evaluate strategies against the range of policy objectives. It presents the results of the strategy tests and identifies those strategy elements which contribute most to the resolution of transport problems. It demonstrates that it is possible, as a result, to achieve improvements in today's levels of environmental conditions, safety and accessibility, despite significant growth in the demand for travel
