Connecting our Place

The Draft ITF is a strategic framework to guide investment and decision making for our transport network as the district grows and faces the challenges of years to come. It has been created in partnership with Waka Kotahi, Te Kotahitanga o te Atiawa and NPDC and will align with the wider regional transport focus, as well as to national and local plans.

The Draft ITF utilises five guiding principles to help solve some of the current transport problems facing the network and offers up a series of initiatives and interventions to help solve these over the short, medium, and long term.

The Draft ITF seeks to solve key problems within our transport network – problems that need to be approached with a long-term view and aligned with our district-wide vision and mission. We’ve identified four key outcomes that can be achieved over time through initiatives and interventions:
• Improving public transport
• Fixing a fragmented active travel network
• Reducing reliance on private cars
• Adapting to urban development

Following public feedback, the Draft ITF will be finalised by Council, with initiatives forming inputs to transportation projects within the 2024-2034 Long Term Plan (LTP), which will be consulted on with the community in March 2024. The LTP is linked to our vision of becoming a Sustainable Lifestyle Capital.

The Draft IFT will continue to be framework for our transport planning and decision making as we move forward.

The four key themes were identified through our existing transport data, plans and strategies such as our:
• 2021-2031 Long Term Plan
• Proposed District Plan
• New Plymouth Transport Strategic Case
• 2021-2051 Infrastructure Strategy

Regional plans we also used as reference points, such as the Taranaki Regional Council Regional Land Transport Plan, the Ministry of Transport’s (indicative) Government Policy Statement on Land Transport and the National Emissions Reduction Plan, among many others.

Currently NPDC has several plans and policies that inform our transportation decisions. Currently these are separate and specific to things like parking. However, transportation is delivered as a network with partners including Taranaki Regional Council and Waka Kotahi. This framework will ensure that we are on the same page as our partners and ensure our related plans all line up under the same framework. Going forward, the Draft ITF will guide our decision makers, ensuring we’re making the right long-term decisions.

Most districts in New Zealand have a plan like this.  It helps to ensure that all the investment and initiatives that we consider play a role in the bigger picture and help our decision makers ensure that anything we decide to do lines up with our long-term vision for our district.

We need to plan for our growing district. In future more people will need to use our transport network and this will stretch our network’s capacity to move and park. This plan will also help ensure that when our key routes need maintaining, or are interrupted by crashes, there is resiliency in the network to keep us all moving.

Feedback from our community tells us that people want choices about how they get from A to B. They also tell us that our current public transport isn’t comprehensive enough and our cycle ways aren’t safe enough to get them to try alternative modes of transport. Safer cycle ways and reliable public transport encourages people to drive less, meaning that there will be fewer cars competing for road and parking spaces

The initiatives in our survey have come together from a range of sources including proven ideas that have worked in other cities, and feedback from our community, transportation engineers and local businesses.

Right now, we’re only looking at district-wide initiatives (included in the survey with high-level cost indications) to see what the community are interested in. The Draft ITF isn’t intended to replace Council’s normal process of presenting a business case, engaging with our community, and detailed costing of options on individual projects. Instead, the Draft ITF will support decision makers when reviewing individual initiatives.

The Draft ITF provides required efficiency in transport planning and decision making. It pulls together all existing Council, local, regional and national transport plans as well as factor in growth, changing environmental expectations and identifies guiding principles and key outcomes of where we want our transport projects to take us. The Draft ITF is flexible and enduring, and can incorporate growth, technology and changing expectations from our community through refreshes when needed.

While the Draft ITF is a framework for making investment decisions in the long term, the 'Your Way' project is a near term initiative that seeks to access specific Government funding. The 'Your Way' consultation seeks feedback on a specific initiative, whereas the Draft ITF consultation seeks to understand how the community would prioritise initiatives to tackle the challenges to our transport network.