How can transport planners and street designers use systems thinking?
I am constantly refreshed by the commitment of transport professionals to their craft and to inclusive and sustainable outcomes. They know good design. And yet. We continue to fall short of our visions. Current approaches to transport planning are good at producing certain results. But when it comes to making transport and streets more accessible for everyone, these approaches aren’t working. Why?
When we model transport networks and estimate returns on investment, we are reducing complex behaviour to a set of parameters that is stubbornly rigid and unrepresentative of the breadth of variables that influence the use of streets.
Streets have many problems, but supply and productivity are not among them. Here are a few:
Build it and they will come: A system built for cars is going to be favourable for cars.
How do I want to spend my time? There are many demands for our time and attention. The most attractive wins. Streets that aren’t inviting or safe for people, aren’t going to be widely used.
Norms: We do what we’re used to. Streets are associated with cars for the reasons above. Most people have lost touch with the potential for streets for people.
Fix the traffic please: The current system works for some; those are the people who often get to influence what gets done next. We are stuck in a story that reinforces streets are for cars; we lack a frame of reference for something different and we expect investment to deliver us more of what we know and are familiar with.
We’re good at doing things this way: Road-building competitive advantage; often siloed. Bias toward evaluating streets against transport measures (this is changing).
Community engagement poses challenges: stuck reacting to complaints, detracts from proactive planning (most vocal get our attention), failure to acknowledge the benefits of the status quo and carve out constructive paths forward, concerted engagement is costly, often don’t hear from the people who are excluded by the current system.
Cue, a viscious cycle of deteriorating social fabric and unhealthy, exclusionary transport. Even though the challenge is not an infrastructure one, we continue to try to fix it in this way. We are very good at identifying certain types of solutions to the detriment of others. And those solutions are not addressing the root causes of our entanglement with car dependent built environments.
But what if there was something we could use as a tool to bridge nature’s holistic principles with the linear approach we’ve come to rely on to replicate results and estimate outcomes?
This is where I see the role of systems innovation, applied to street design. System innovation is what you get when you apply systems thinking to try to find a way to change something.
Let's take one tool - system mapping. System mapping can be a useful tool to explore possibilities, interdependence and feedback loops. You can then zoom in on a point of leverage and establish new boundaries. Simplify the parameters for the sake of the model; in full cognisance of the data you are omitting. By challenging assumptions you make the model infinitely better.
Let’s take this a step further. What if, in addition to expanding the parameters you considered in your model, you also paid attention to the causal chain in your system map. What if you questioned how you were contributing to current outcomes; what was preventing long-term change, and how you could influence a different result? What if you used your system map to spark conversation with other people who influence the system, to learn about it from their point of view? What if instead of doing more of the same, the system map pointed you to a different intervention that might be capable of producing a different result by rewiring the parts that make up the system- an intervention that might not even be related to policy let alone infrastructure. Would you consider it?
Here are six shifts that represent a systemic approach to street design. Might these allow us to change the paradigm of streets into one where streets nurture people and nature?
Six shifts that make up a systemic approach to street design. (© 2025 by Laura Aston Wayfinder Labs CC BY-SA 4.0)
When I applied these approaches to the wicked problems that drive my work, I realised that the best way to respond is with reconnection - with collaboration and participatory design. Instead of prioritising interventions that manage demand; improve productivity or increase supply, what if we could respond to street network problems with an intervention, that required no assets, only relationships?
I’ve observed these approaches surfacing everywhere - it’s just that there’s still some resistance and guidelines that reinforce traditional approaches. And so, a provocation to close, what would it take to make these shifts possible?