A study on early-stage transport planning in the Nordic countries : With special focus on collaboration and integration of environmental aspects

• Main Author: Sævarsdóttir, Bergrós Arna
• Format: Bachelor Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: KTH, Hållbarhet och miljöteknik 2020
• Subjects: The Nordic countries; transport planning; collaborative planning; expert knowledge; environmental assessment; SEA; CBA; Natural Sciences; Naturvetenskap; Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-285797

In today‘s society, transport between places plays an important role in people‘s everyday life resulting in unavoidable effect on the environment. Emissions from the transport sector in the Nordic Region are expected to increase the coming years because of growing urbanization and population, so it becomes apparent that transport planners today are facing a complex system that requires to change in order to reach sustainability. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the planning systems and processes to enable improvements. The aim of this study is to analyse and compare how environmental aspects are incorporated in the process of defining measures at early stages in transport planning in the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, with the focus on each country‘s capital region. The focus is set on where and how collaboration between stakeholders and expert knowledge are included in the planning processes in the different countries. To meet the aim, a case study approach was chosen where semi-structured interviews with planning practitioners from all the countries were conducted to gather data, together with literature review and document analysis to set the scope of the study. The interview results showed that early-stage transport planning is practiced differently in the five countries. In Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden transport authorities or administrations are responsible for long-term strategic development of the transport system at a national and regional level, and they have defined how transport planning processes should be conducted. In these cases, collaboration between stakeholders and with experts occurs through workshops or working groups created at early stages. In Denmark, there is no longterm strategic transport planning at national or regional level. There, collaboration occurs at project level where experts and stakeholders are included when a project is being planned. Environmental assessment tools and methods were shown to be used at early stages and the ...