Policy design and infrastructure planning: finding tools to promote land use transport integration

Governments have widely adopted policy goals that span the domains of land use and transport, such as promoting accessibility and reducing the environmental impact of transport. Despite these crosscutting ambitions, government action often remains fragmented as it has persistently proven to be a struggle to overcome the segmented organization of land use and transport planning. Responding to a growing need for an effective approach to land use and transport integration (LUTI), this research adopts a policy design perspective that revolves around the conscious effort of matching policy instruments to policy goals in order to attain desired outcomes. Using four interrelated in-depth cases studies, this study combines an institutional analysis, a longitudinal analysis, a comparative case study and a qualitative comparative analysis of Dutch national and regional transport planning with the aim of determining how policy design thinking can help to bring together the planning of land use and transport infrastructure. Overall, the study finds that a policy design approach to LUTI is more than simply matching goals and instruments. Instead, it involves tailoring a mix of mutually supportive procedural and substantive instruments to fit specific integrated land use and transport goals, while at the same time preventing policy designs to develop into sub-optimal configurations by managing ongoing design dynamics, and making policy instruments responsive to the contextual setting in which they are employed. The four case studies presented in this thesis provide insight into why LUTI remains a struggle and how policy design can be applied to promote such integration.