How can planning for accessibility lead to more integrated transport and land-use strategies? Two examples from the Netherlands

In both the scientific and professional community, the need to integrate transport and land-use policies in order to achieve more sustainable urban development is widely recognized. Accessibility can provide a conceptual focus for this integration because it relates to both features of the transport system (e.g. speed, and travel costs) as well as the land-use system (e.g. density and functional mix). The concept of accessibility is well known within the scientific literature. The understanding of how it can improve transport land-use planning integration in practice, however, is still limited. In order to address this gap between theory and practice, we discuss two case studies in the Netherlands in which policy-makers from both transport and land-use planning developed and used accessibility indicators to generate and select effective combinations of transport and land-use interventions. For each case, the type of accessibility indicators used and the way they contributed to an integrated assessment of the quality of the transport and land-use system and the different policy options that resulted from the assessment are discussed. Finally, we reflect on the potentials and limits of this approach, and on the opportunities and barriers for its implementation in day to day planning practice.