Applying Movement and Place to Inflight Projects

Introduction

This section offers guidance for project teams seeking to apply the NSW Movement and Place approach to projects that are already underway, including how to review your project’s consistency with the NSW Movement and Place Framework, and if necessary, adjusting your project to align with the Framework. All TfNSW projects and plans must demonstrate how they align with the NSW Movement and Place Framework, regardless of how advanced they are.

How is this different to ‘business as usual’?

Many of the recommended inputs and outputs that make up the Movement and Place core process are already part of most planning and project development approaches. However, there are some significant differences. Movement and Place involves:

• involving stakeholders in developing a shared project-specific, place-based vision from the outset, and in developing project objectives based on this vision
• using this vision as a guide, involving stakeholders and multiple disciplines in a collaborative process that integrates land-use planning and transport planning, to develop contextual responses
• using the Movement and Place Built Environment Performance Indicators to evaluate projects and compare projects
• documenting decisions to demonstrate how project teams have analysed and considered the project context and the needs of users to generate options and select a preferred option for further review and approval.

The Movement and Place collaboration report template can help you to report inputs, outputs and processes to decision-makers. We encourage you to use this template to test and demonstrate your project’s alignment with the Movement and Place Framework.

Using the core process for an initial review

The following considerations can help practitioners to review existing work and processes:

Which of the steps are relevant to your project?

Which of the six steps in the Movement and Place core process are relevant to your inflight project or plan? The importance of individual steps within the process depends on the context, purpose and scope of your project. When reviewing your project against the core process, ensure you consider all the steps, regardless of barriers such as timeline constraints or budgets.

How much of the core process have you already completed?

Where possible, use existing work to test your project’s alignment with the steps in the Movement and Place core process. To what extent do the inputs and outputs of work you have already undertaken align with those recommended in the Practitioner's Guide to Movement and Place?

For example, some of the required analysis or decisions may already have been completed. Equally, previous efforts by other project teams may have produced partial outputs contributing to the core process.

How does your approach compare?

You may have undertaken work in line with complementary international best practice planning approaches, such as Transport for London’s Healthy Streets assessments, or the Complete Streets approach. Many of these underlying principles are similar to the NSW place-based planning approach and have informed the development of the NSW Movement and Place Framework.

To ensure these approaches and policies are consistent with the NSW context, assess the relevant project inputs and outputs in relation to the individual steps of the Movement and Place core process and consider the key issues set out in this guidance.

Minimum requirements

The figure below shows how the Movement and Place core process supplements and aligns with other evaluation processes. You can use this to compare the requirements between the different frameworks, to better understand how your project aligns with the Movement and Place process.

Projects or plans fitting into the initial steps of the core process (Steps 1-4) are more likely to have sufficient scope or budget to reconfigure the previous approach and set a course for strong alignment with the Movement and Place Framework throughout the later stages of the project life cycle.

However, the closer a project or plan is to finalisation (Steps 5-6), the more likely it is that project teams have already identified or engaged with stakeholders, prepared a set of potential options or arrived at a preferred option. Regardless of how far advanced your project is, when it comes to communicating a preferred option to the appropriate decision-makers and stakeholders, your project team will need to demonstrate:

A shared understanding of how transport networks are integrated with land use and public space within the study area, and how they serve users’ needs.

Have the right people been involved?

Movement and Place uses a workshop model with a core team leading the process and preparing analyses for discussion and refinement at the workshops. The process is scalable to smaller meetings or larger forums with break-out sessions. The iterative nature of the core process requires regular testing and validation of inputs and outputs relating to the individual steps.

Whether you are at the early stages of a project or plan (policy, master planning, community engagement) or approaching investment decisions, detailed design, or construction, your project or plan will need to have engaged with someone who represents place and movement relevant to the context from the outset. The stakeholders involved will depend on the stage, sensitivity and scale of projects. As a minimum requirement, a project or plan will need to demonstrate to decision-makers that all road users, context-specific place experts, and the general community have been appropriately represented from the outset.

If a different project team or project manager have been involved in previous stages of a project or plan, information on stakeholder engagement and workshops will need to be documented to confirm the right people have been involved at the right time.

More information on evaluating engagement and collaboration in line with the Movement and Place approach is outlined in the Evaluator's Guide to Movement and Place.

Has the project been guided by a shared place-based vision from the outset?

The Movement and Place core process operationalises a ‘vision and validate’ approach, as distinct from the traditional ‘predict and provide’ approach. Vision and validate requires project teams to acquire a refined understanding of movement and place specific to the study area and develop a shared vision for the study area based on this understanding.

As a minimum requirement, project teams need to demonstrate that a place-based vision has been developed through input from all stakeholders, aligning with the strategic intent for the study area and community sentiment, needs and values. The project vision and objectives are not the core team’s exclusive work – they are shaped by representatives of all road users, context-specific place experts and the general community.

Where appropriate, project teams can document the shared place-based vision and hand this over to others for subsequent work stages if necessary. This avoids the risk of project teams at later stages of the project life cycle separating their work from a previously established vision and objectives.

Projects that have focused primarily on movement outcomes can use the iterative nature of the Movement and Place process to incorporate a detailed place analysis. It is never too late to engage with the local community and demonstrate an understanding of the complementary or conflicting relationship between movement and place functions within a study area. If the impact of a project or plan on places has not been adequately considered, projects may be restricted or delayed and will need to provide additional information after project completion.

How will the project improve the built environment?

A good place-based vision is specific and sets the conditions for creating successful places for the people that will use them. The project’s objectives and evaluation criteria need to reflect the pathway for achieving this shared vision. Generally speaking, a project can demonstrate alignment with Movement and Place by selecting both place and movement criteria when measuring progress towards achieving a shared, place-based vision.

For all inflight projects, project managers are encouraged to demonstrate how the Movement and Place built environment indicators have been or are being used to measure and evaluate the options developed. If other, project-specific indicators have been selected, project teams need to consider and demonstrate how they relate to improving each of the five built environment themes. As a minimum, all projects need to demonstrate how each aspect of the built environment themes has been or will be improved to achieve a well-designed built environment, ensuring they focus on both movement and place outcomes.

How will you respond?

Depending on how your project or plan complies with the minimum requirements set out above, you will need to choose one or more of the following approaches:

• Continue as planned
• Delay the project – not necessarily involving a change of scope, but taking more time to engage with stakeholders or evaluate and report against the Movement and Place built environment indicators
• Reframe the project – make minor changes or improvements to the current project and identify things that can potentially be pushed into the next steps – i.e. project requirements post-approval or alternative avenues for handing over to future planning stages
• Change the scope – make a material change to the project budget and scope, but keep the same project fundamentals, e.g. addressing severance along a motorway.
• Go back – rethink the whole approach and start from the beginning

Deciding which approach to take can be influenced by budget, timescale or forces outside the project’s scope or control. Decision-making may need to be cumulative, as a project may need to be delayed once its scope changes, for example. Equally, reframing the project may allow progress to continue as planned if the project team is sure minimum requirements can be identified post-approval. Using the Movement and Place process, it is normal practice for project managers to go back and review and revise a project or plan if something identifies there may be gaps, misunderstandings or previous decisions that can be improved upon.

The greatest benefits and value can be built into a plan or project if a flexible, reflective and iterative Movement and Place approach is adopted from the outset.

Movement and Place aims for a culture of continuous improvement in planning and project development. Project teams are encouraged to reflect on constraints and document problems and lessons learnt in relation to the process, and share these insights with subsequent work streams as well as other project teams. When documenting a decision, detailed information needs to be provided on why the decision was made over others. In this way, each project can build on previous experience, and the project or plan currently being worked on can be better than the last.

Ask the Implementation Board

The Movement and Place Implementation Board guides the application of the Movement and Place Framework in NSW, leading and guiding engagement with the sector in the effective delivery of movement and place outcomes.

One of the key tasks of the Board is to review projects seeking to use a Movement and Place approach in NSW.

Projects can be identified by the Board for review, or project managers can refer their inflight projects to the Movement and Place Implementation Board for advice and input on adopting a Movement and Place approach.

To present your project at one of the monthly Board meetings, get in touch with the Secretariat and arrange an informal meeting to discuss the purpose and content of a project referral.

At the Board meeting, the presentation to the Board will need to provide, as a minimum, a clear direction on what your project team is seeking advice on and the project background and context that will inform that advice.

In most cases, the Board will provide a whole-of-government perspective on the project and suggest mechanisms for aligning with the Movement and Place approach. This could be in the form of using subcommittees to address particular issues or identifying other resources to help resolve issues.

The Board’s comments on your project will be captured and documented in a brief report which will be circulated to the core project team for reference. In some cases, the Board will invite a project team to return and attend a future Board meeting to provide an update on how the project is tracking including how the team has implemented the Board’s advice.

To contact the Implementation Board, please get in touch with the Secretariat.