Wayne Purdue, Transport Planner

Wayne is a Lancastrian, from Warrington. He studied economics at Lancaster University, having been advised at school that ‘economists would get all the best jobs’, but had ‘always had an interest in transport …everything that moved interested me’. After University Wayne returned home, played rugby and did manual work while waiting for a ‘proper job’. In about 1967/68 he applied for a job as a research fellow in transport studies at Cranfield Institute of Technology and moved to Milton Keynes area, joining a group of three people in the ‘transport assessment group’. Over the next 5 years the group gained greater recognition and became the Centre for Transport Studies, presenting its first Master’s course in Transport Assessment three years after Wayne’s arrival. The group’s research used MK as a source of data for transportation modelling, testing different sizes of grid network, which showed the kilometre grid was probably the optimum one. Wayne’s interest in MK developed and he says: ‘ I didn’t feel I’d actually been out in the real world and got my boots dirty; I felt I needed to do something practical’. So when in 1972 he saw a transport planning position advertised at MKDC it was an easy decision to apply. After 1992, Wayne set up on his own as a transport planning consultant.