URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING

Running head: URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING
URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING
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URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING
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Introduction
Transportation plays an important role in urban development. It offers mobility for
citizens in addition to goods as well as possessions in addition to shapes the patterns of
developments and diverse viewpoints of economic activity by means of land accessibility
(Al-Mosaind 2018). The arrangement of transportation is deliberated one of the main
explanations of urban development as the association between the expansion of high-paced
roadways, urban development in addition to the population growth. The emergence of traffic
and consequently traffic overcrowding in urban road systems are growing worldwide with the
rising number of vehicles, which are causing additional delays, and reducing security and
wellbeing (Aljoufie et al. 2016). The social, economic contrivances of urban growth are
linked to rise of urban population as well as economic growth, while physical components of
urban development as well as financial growth are related to spatial growth, land cover
modification and land usage change. These complex connections are instigated by numerous
forces like transportation in addition to communication along with internal and global
movements, public strategies as well as high natural growth rates of urban inhabitants.
Traditional urban planning approaches in rapid growing cities such as Riyadh city and Jeddah
in Saudi Arabia fail to deal with the negative significances of fast urban growth (Aldalbahi
and Walker 2015). The following paper will explain the transport policies in the Saudi Arabia
and few of its cities. It will also provide proposed policies to resolve the recurrent issue of
transportation and traffic congestion in Saudi.
Discussion
Transport policies in the Saudi Arabia and few of its cities
There have been numerous endeavours to develop new and ground-breaking policies
with an agenda of improving the staggering transport complications faced worldwide.
Majority of these policies are intended to give emphasis to the well-organized utilization of

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Transportation Demand Management (TDM) as well as Transportation Supply Management
(TSM) solutions (Al-Mosaind 2018). The decisive goal of these policies is to restrain the
endless reliance on automobile travel within cities. Since the last five decades, structure and
local plans have been prepared for Jeddah. Irrespective of these policies, issues with
transportation congestion tends to continue. This is attributed by the restrictions on
conventional urban planning practices as well as absence of suitable and organized policy
(Acharya et al 2017).
Since 2010, land subdivision policies as well as processes have created large-scale
activity all through the Jeddah city. However, a major gap has been identified between urban
growth policies and transportation policies. On the other hand, Riyadh never comprised of an
effective public transport system. As per reports, after the expiration of the SCET order in
around 1999, the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs (MOMRA) developed a novel
strategy called the Metropolitan Development Strategy for Ar Riyadh (MEDSTAR) with an
agenda of managing city expansion over the upcoming 5 decades (Aljoufie et al. 2016). The
policy focused on the arrangement of higher mass housing as well as commercial expansion
with significant public transport zones. It also put emphasis on the improvement of the ring
road arrangement for extracting the pressure from congested central arterial roadways.
According to Aljoufie et al (2016), the policy implemented by MEDSTAR, a new Riyadh
Public Transport Project (RPTP) has been accepted with an aim of lessening dependency of
vehicles and further to fit into the majority of the regions of Riyadh.
Meanwhile, in Jeddah, transportation policies and guidelines like the predominant
transport infrastructure provision policy increased the issues of radically augmented traffic
movement (Abouhassan 2017). Despite the fact, that this policy has delivered a superior
availability and ease to diverse forms of land utilization; after a certain point it showed high
incapacity of dealing with the lag elevating transportable demands, thereby causing an