Transport planning and the policy cycle:analysing deployed instruments and their interactions

Transport planners and policymakers rely on a mix of policy instruments to deal with transport problems. The fit, or lack thereof, between instruments can make a difference in policy outcomes. Recently, more attention has been paid to how various policy instruments interact and complement each other to support effective problem-solving. Using examples from Dutch transport planning, we explore the interaction between instruments both within and across the various stages of the policy cycle. We find that instrument complementarity is not a given. Since transport instrument mixes evolve incrementally over time, they include instrumental legacies of various past planning and policy logics. The findings illustrate and help understand how and why transport planning instruments that were employed under different logics can work against each other. This result raises questions about how and where transport policymakers should redesign existing policy instruments when introducing new ones to address transportation problems.