This paper describes the development in the Netherlands of the 'mobiliteitstoets', an instrument that can be used by urban planners and traffic and transportation experts in developing new areas. One of the more recent ideas is that in order to continuously improve traffic safety it is desirable to integrate urban planning and traffic issues as early as possible in planning procedures and urban development processes. Due to this it will be easier to develop new, safe infrastructure as well as the environment of surrounding area. Expensive policy measures are anticipated to be unnecessary. In order to make this possible the mobiliteitstoets will include traffic safety as one of the basic criteria. The most important objective has always been to integrate issues of traffic and transportation in the preparation, development and design of regional and local urban plans. Usually however, it became clear that this type of integration was almost never met in practice. Urban plans of newly developed locations still have a precedence over integration between traffic and transportation aspects and urban planning. Also, it is concluded that cooperation and communication between urban planners and traffic (safety) experts often fails. The objective of the so called 'mobiliteitstoets' is to facilitate regional and local policymakers in taking traffic and transportation aspects into account while preparing and developing local and regional urban plans. Also, the mobiliteitstoets needs to motivate local and regional policymakers to act in a more proactive matter while developing urban plans. The paper describes the study that was implemented to make the first step in developing this instrument: the 'mobiliteitstoets'. The results show that there are two different factors responsible for the successful integration between urban planning and traffic safety: traffic and transportation related content factors and process and organisational factors. For the covering abstract see ITRD E126595.
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