Our latest report, out today, has confirmed what we had long suspected; new housing estates being built in England resemble a jigsaw puzzle with some of the most important pieces missing – the stations, the mass transit systems and on-site community provision and services.

What is being built in 2025? In search of the station, reveals that housing targets aimed at rural parts of the country and a developer-led choice of location are creating car-dependent estates far away from major urban areas and isolated from good public transport, and that car-based suburban sprawl is now the default model of development.

It concludes that unless we start to build differently we will end up with more and more of this ‘doughnut effect’, whereby everything ends up on out of town greenfield sites whilst brownfield sites lie unbuilt and derelict, and high streets are dying.

What is being built in 2025? In search of the station, looked at nearly 40 new housing developments, including four in Europe (Germany and Sweden), and explored a number of themes, including: whether the development was ultimately designed around the car; traffic generation and its consequences; public transport connections including bus, local rail and trams; and whether there are a range of amenities to walk or cycle to. The report also includes a section on why the planning system fails to deliver sustainable transport.

Volunteers visited each development and looked at the type and mix of housing, transport links, layout and on-site facilities, and concluded that nearly every greenfield development was oriented around the car. None of the large-scale housing greenfield developments visited for the report were on metro or tram systems, buses were in many cases infrequent or insufficient and went to limited destinations, and safe and convenient active travel options did not connect the development to places people wanted to go to. The report only identified one large-scale greenfield development, Poundbury in Dorset, which it considered to be a vibrant ‘self-contained’ community on account of being genuinely mixed use and built from the start for walking rather than driving.

To accomplish a different model of delivering new homes and avoid more car-dependent sprawl, Transport for New Homes makes three recommendations:

• Build transit-oriented developments serving residents from day one of occupation: New developments should be planned around better public transport, connected with metros, tram systems and comprehensive bus networks, available to residents on the day they move in to avoid entrenching car dependency. 
• New homes must be built in better locations: The planning system needs to direct building in more sustainable locations, with decisions on where we build new homes taken with more of an evidence-based approach. Places must be selected that will work with new transport infrastructure and promote regeneration, economic growth and good access to services. A revised National Planning Policy Framework needs to make this kind of wider area planning possible. 
• Deliverable masterplans that create delightful walkable places: Chosen sites for housing need a masterplan designed to deliver walkable places with well connected public transport and the funding to realise the plan. To achieve this, transport and land use planning must be tied together at the local authority level with changes to the current planning system to make this possible.