Abstract:
The transport planning profession is becoming increasingly aware of how uncertain the
future is. The level of uncertainty in transport planning and decision-making has intensified
‒ as it has in a number of spheres of policy ‒ in the face of climate change, political and
economic instability, technological innovation, and changing consumer preferences
(Lyons, 2016). COVID-19 has accelerated many innovative and disruptive transitions,
expanding the set of plausible futures and compounding the ‘deep’ uncertainty that we
have about planning for a future that is decades, and many crises, away from the present
(UN-Habitat, 2020). Conventional transport planning practices conceal uncertainty by
relying heavily on historic cause-effect relationships, and result in misplaced confidence in
our predictive abilities (Marsden & McDonald, 2019). This presentation outlines the
development of the Comprehensive Integrated Transport Plan (CITP) and Integrated
Public Transport Network (IPTN) plan in the City of Cape Town using new transport
planning practices that try to grapple with the deep uncertainty we’re facing in long-term
transport planning in South Africa. The new approach brings together new techniques from
the climate adaptation, Decision-Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU), and
sustainability transitions research fields into transport planning. This development process
has resulted from a unique knowledge co-production arrangement between academia and
local government that was started in 2017. The lessons from developing this new transport
planning approach together, which still meets the established CITP and IPTN plan
requirements, will be relevant to those cities across South Africa, and many others in the
Global South, who are looking to embed more resilience in their transport planning system
in the post-covid era.
