Site logistics plan vs traffic management plan: what each one covers

If you've sat through a pre-start meeting where someone asks "is that covered in the SLP or the TMP?" and nobody in the room gives the same answer, you're not alone. The two documents overlap enough to cause genuine confusion on site, and enough projects still file them separately that the handoff between them is where things fall through.

What the site logistics plan covers

The site logistics plan (SLP) is the whole-site document. It's where you show laydown areas, material storage zones, crane and plant positions, welfare facilities, site boundaries, hoarding lines, and the general flow of how the site gets built around the people and materials on it. A good SLP tells a visiting subcontractor where to park, where their materials get dropped, and which parts of the compound are off-limits on a given phase.

It's a planning document first. On most projects it gets drawn up at mobilisation and revised phase by phase as the building rises and the compound shrinks. The person who owns it is usually the principal contractor's site or project manager, sometimes with a logistics manager on bigger jobs. It answers where everything lives and moves across the full footprint of the site.

What the traffic management plan covers

The traffic management plan (TMP) is narrower and more specific. It deals with vehicle movement: haul routes in and out of site, swept paths for the largest vehicle expected, banksman positions, pedestrian segregation from moving plant, signage, and often a wider interface with the public highway if deliveries or site traffic touch a road the local authority controls. A TMP on a tight urban job might run to several pages just on segregation at the site gate.

Where an SLP says "deliveries come in off the east access and go to the laydown area," a TMP says how that vehicle gets from the public road to that gate safely, what speed it travels at, who's banked in at the pinch point, and what happens if two vehicles need the same route at once. The TMP is the document a traffic marshal works from on site, day to day.

Where the two documents are supposed to meet

In theory the SLP sets the layout and the TMP governs the movement within it. In practice the failure point is usually a laydown area or storage zone creeping into what the TMP has marked as a swept path, or a gate position on the SLP that the TMP's banksman arrangement never accounted for because the two documents were drawn up by different people at different times. Revisions to one rarely trigger a formal check against the other, so drift builds up quietly over a few months of phased handovers.

That drift is exactly the kind of thing a weekly site check catches before it becomes a near-miss report: a stack of pallets now sitting where the swept path was supposed to be, a compound fence line that's shifted into the pedestrian route marked on the TMP. Site Logistics Audit reads the site from overhead each week and flags that kind of encroachment against the plan, without someone doing a full walk of every zone to find it.

Do you need both documents on every project

For anything beyond the smallest domestic job, yes. CDM duties on larger or more complex sites expect a logistics plan as part of the construction phase plan, and most local authorities will ask for a TMP separately if the works affect a public highway, footpath, or shared access. Smaller sites sometimes fold a lighter version of traffic arrangements into the SLP itself rather than running two separate documents, but the content still needs to be there in some form. If your project has a banksman, a haul route, or any vehicle movement that crosses a pedestrian path, that's a TMP question whether or not it's a standalone document.

Worth checking both plans against what's on the ground this week, rather than what was agreed at the pre-start meeting three months ago.