Transport planning

Transport planning straddles engineering, town planning, and architecture. The discipline considers all modes of transport and influences the development and design of transport facilities or new buildings to maximise accessibility, improve journey times, reduce congestion, encourage sustainable and healthy transport, or ideally all of the above.

There is a skills shortage in this sector and graduates don’t need an engineering degree: geography and economics graduates commonly become transport planners, but so too can those who studied any degree, from English to biochemistry.

On the job as a graduate planner

Projects that graduate transport planners might work on include:

• Assessing the business case for a new railway line
• Designing the transport facilities for a new school and undertaking a transport assessment to ensure the impacts of school traffic are minimised
• Creating a strategy for a business to improve its sustainability credentials and the health of its staff by promoting sustainable travel to work
• Investigating opportunities for transport improvements in a regeneration area.

On the job, you could help set up and run traffic models, check proposed layouts to see whether they will work in practice, analyse local government policy to advise clients on whether schemes comply or create maps using Geographic Information Systems software. You’ll work within a department sub-divided into teams, often having between seven and ten members.

Transport planners can either have a love of detail or be good conceptual-level thinkers. Detail lovers will find themselves at home with transport models and detailed analysis, whereas conceptual thinkers may prefer to look at policies and spatial planning/masterplanning, which is all about thinking about high-level issues and how these affect how large areas of land are used.

Graduate employers in transport planning

Graduate employers include specialist transport planning consultancies, local authorities, engineering consultancies, planning consultancies, urban design practices and architects, management consultancies and transport providers.

Professional qualifications for transport planners

You can gain a professional qualification from the Transport Planning Society (TPS) and Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation (CIHT), designed to be equivalent to chartered engineering status but covering all areas of transport. If you work exclusively in the more engineering/design areas of the discipline, you could work towards chartered engineering status with the Institution of Civil Engineers or CIHT.

Essential skills for graduate trainees

• Spatial thinking/awareness: ability to see how objects relate to each other in space
• Common sense
• Observational powers: having an awareness of transport issues from looking at what’s happening on the street is important.
• An eye for detail and ability to see the bigger picture.

Highs and lows of a transport planning graduate career

Projects can take a long time to be completed. Planners are usually involved in the earliest stages so in three years I have only seen one of my projects fully finished and operational. Transport planners have a chance to make a noticeable difference. People in general notice bad transport design and this career gives you a chance to do it better.

Judith Cohen is a transport planner at Ramboll UK. She studied geography at the University of Oxford and has three years' experience of working in this sector.

• Read Judith's account of her working life as a transport planner