Excellence Award for Integrated Environments group

Arup has been awarded the Planning Institute of Australia’s (PIA) WA Planning Excellence Award for ‘Improving Planning Process and Practices’.

The award winning entry, titled ’Transitions: moving from rhetoric to priority in 21st century Perth’, was a collaborative research partnership to update the Practitioner’s Guide to Bus Movement and Priority.

The research partnership was led by Arup’s Integrated Environments Group, and included the Public Transport Authority and the Department of Transport. This research project provided the foundation for user-friendly guidelines for bus priorities in local planning design. It also examined the increasing importance of public transport in Western Australian transport policy and planning and identified current philosophies in relation to public transport service provision.

The Practitioner’s Guide is intended to help drive future investment decisions in conjunction with the implementation of the Activity Centres Policy (Directions 2031) and a ‘Moving People’ Network Plan due for release in 2012.

An update to less user friendly guides developed in the early 2000s, the Guide is now concise and accessible and it will be a valuable tool in assisting planners with the delivery of public transport in a more effective manner.

“Another great award for Arup and a testament to the quality of work we are undertaking with our project partners. It is fantastic to see this work recognised by PIA and industry feedback has also been excellent. The Guide represents a timely resource for Perth given the increasing focus on transit priority.”

- Ryan Falconer, Senior transport planner at Arup

The PIA Awards for Planning Excellence recognise outstanding planning achievements and is a highly regarded industry awards program. It provides a forum to showcase excellence and promote planning to the wider community.

This continues Arup’s recent award winning streak for excellence. Arup’s Integrated Environment Group recently collected an award for their Transit Oriented Development work for the Public Transport Authority (AITPM Award for Transport Planning and Innovation) and team member Ryan Falconer was recognised at the TravelSmart Awards.