The concept of community severance has been recognised as an environmental impact of transport since the 1920s. Initially, in the 1920s and 1930s, community severance was seen purely as the separation of homes and work places. With the introduction of large urban highways from the 1950s onwards, practitioners started to recognise both the social and psychological dimensions of community severance. The social dimensions of severance were thought to include factors that affected community cohesion, such as the reduction of interaction caused by the presence of a physical barrier (e.g. aroad or railway line). Psychological dimensions were related to an individual's perceptions of the barrier and included the perceived unpleasantness and difficulty of making a journey along or across a road. More recent empirical research and theoretical work on understanding community severance focused on defining both its causes and impacts in greater detail. This paper reports on a research study undertaken by the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) for the Department for Transport in response to the UK Government's report 'Transport and Social Exclusion: Making the Connections'. The main objective of the study was to explore how communities experience severance effects, explore how practitioners deal with community severance,and investigate whether there are any lessons to be learnt for improving the way in which community severance is assessed for appraisal. For the covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
Samenvatting