12 May 2011
STAR conference told how to Civilise the Streets
Transform Scotland research officer Jolin Warren reports:
Earlier today I attended the Scottish Transport Applications and Research (STAR) conference in Glasgow, which is an annual event bringing people together from across the transport industry in Scotland. I had the privilege of presenting our Civilising the Streets research as part of the "Places for People" session. The other presentations in my session looked at the impact of local and regional transport policies on active travel (by Bruce Whyte from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health) and the effectiveness of the varied smarter travel brands in use as part of the Government's Smarter Choices, Smarter Places programme (by Philip Glennie from Transport Scotland). As a group, the talks worked well together, and our audience of approximately 30 people seemed to find the session interesting.
Overall, there was good attendance at the conference, and a god range of topics. The morning plenary was particularly enlightening, with David Scotney from Napier University discussing the problems with focussing on journey time reductions in transport project assessment, and Chris Day of the City of Edinburgh Council providing an overview of how we ended up with the current UK high speed rail proposals. It was good to be able to attend this conference and to have the chance to share some of the research Transform Scotland is carrying out.