Public consultation is a specific requirement of the Local Transport Plan (LTP) process and has led to many new and productive working relationships between key stakeholders involved in transport decision making. This paper presents the findings arising from a series of public consultation activities which have been organised by the five metropolitan councils in Tyne and Wear who, with Nexus (the Tyne and Wear PTE), have been jointly responsible for the preparation of the Tyne and Wear LTP. Events across the five councils have taken the form of focus groups, fora and panel meetings of key user groups. These ongoing activities formed part of the full LTP submission in July 2000. In addition, a mail- and internet-based household questionnaire was delivered throughout Tyne and Wear generating over 30,000 responses. The aim of this exercise was to gather attitudinal data regarding the preferences for alternative travel demand management measures, the perceived quality of various aspects of the transport network and priorities for investment. The overall objective of this paper is to provide a summary of the activities carried out and their findings and to comment on their wider contribution to the consultation process. The emphasis will principally be on the results of the analysis of the returns from the household questionnaire. These comprise: (a) an overview of responses for Tyne and Wear and for each of the five districts; and (b) appropriate statistical analysis regarding selected variables (e.g. age, gender, car availability, attitudes to LTP objectives) to measure variation in responses between different groups of respondents, between and within the five districts in Tyne and Wear.
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