I recently attended a conference entitled Striking a Balance on Busy Urban Streets - innovation and emerging practice, the centrepiece of which was the launch of a book called Link & Place - a guide to street planning and design.

Although I'll grant you that the titles of both could be snappier, the book is one that I consider many of you might well want to know more about. But first let's agree, shall we, that we can abbreviate its moniker to L&P.

Secondly, let me be quite frank and say that, what with (a) L&P running to 250 pages of text (and weighing in at over 2lbs) and (b) my having a life, I haven't yet read the thing from cover to cover. Indeed, I may never do so - but more of that later. What I have done is read the executive summary, visit certain sections of the main text and listen to the authors' own verbal introductions to what L&P is all about.

The collective perspective of the three authors is very close to the heart of this writer, as witness the statement that: 'Street planning is about much more than just providing good transport infrastructure; it is also about quality 'place making', supporting liveability, urban vitality and sustainability'.

Those of you familiar with the principal tenets of the Manual for Streets (if you're not, put this down at once and brush up on the MfS before proceeding) will quickly realise that for 'Link' read 'movement status' and for 'Place' read, er, 'place status'. All well and good but if L&P inhabits the same territory as MfS - published just half a year earlier - what's its raison d'être? L&P soon makes that clear but is wonderfully coy in doing so.

'The downside of this approach, of course, is that it takes an awful lot of work to deliver the outputs'

'Current street guidance is primarily geared towards local, residential streets. There is a need for more strategic, comprehensive guidance covering the integrated planning and design of the urban street network as a whole,' it says. 'This Guide sets out to meet that need'.

Let me put this into the vernacular: 'Frankly, the Manual for Streets merely picked the low-hanging fruit and bottled out on high streets and the like. L&P goes where the DfT feared to tread.' This is hardly news, of course, not least to readers of this column, and indeed several of MfS' own authors would say as much.

Nevertheless, all credit to the Jones-Boujenko-Marshall triumvirate for being prepared to pick up the baton and run with it down complex urban thoroughfares that are presently near guidance-free zones, over-regulated engineers' playthings, do-it-yourself design laboratories or basket cases, depending on your point of view.

One way in which the step on from MfS is made most clear is in L&P's presentation of a matrix with 'link status levels' along one axis and 'place status levels' along the other.

This matrix allows all streets, indeed all sections of all streets, to be classified as belonging to 1 of between 16 and 36 categories (the matrix can grow from 4x4 to 6x6 depending on the size/complexity of the town/city in question) and clearly builds on the much more conceptual movement/place status chart in MfS (it's on p19 if you want to review).

This matrix approach allows the link/place principles to be assessed and expressed more clearly and, in defining a number of different categories, gives the outputs a more quantitative value. This is in recognition of the fact that, for example, potential funders of schemes may struggle to be able to commit to measures about the benefits of which they are told little more than that they will 'enhance place status' or 'redress the current imbalance between movement and place status'.

The downside of this approach, of course, is that it takes an awful lot of work to deliver the outputs, especially the more complex one's streets are, and the more of them one is responsible for. Every street can, and often will, need to be subdivided into segments, each of which is allocated to one of the matrix categories; there are both link status and place status weightings; and there is a street performance profile that involves scoring in respect of 11 different 'strategic performance indicators'.

L&P is quite right to say that: 'The development and implementation of a comprehensive and holistic framework for urban street planning and design represents a major change in the way most authorities and policy makers currently deal with urban streets'. But it also represents a major challenge and one to which 'most authorities' may feel themselves unable or unwilling to rise.

At the launch conference a summary of the majority of comments that were made to me, or that I simply overheard, would be: 'This approach is all very well for TfL but who else is going to be able to use it?'. The development of what L&P calls a Street Plan - a strategy for the entire street network for one's area of influence - will be a resource-heavy exercise for any authority.

While Transport for London has pursued such an approach in its Network Management Planning initiative, even the UK's other major cities may baulk at the size of the task. Practitioners may also feel that the lack of formal governmental or institutional support puts L&P in the 'purely optional' file.

This would, in my view, be a great pity. It decidedly is high time for practitioners to have and to use tools that will help them to deal effectively with the real and increasing challenges of designing the most complex or otherwise pain-in-the-neck urban streets. L&P sets out to be that tool but may, almost literally, be too heavy for many. L&P Lite anyone?