The project ‘Designing sustainable accessibility’ contributes to the transition of sustainable mobility through the development of a ‘Participatory Planning Support System’ that enables more effective integration of spatial and transport planning.

The approach aims at supporting the generation of potential sustainable transport land use interventions, rather than, as with most available transport land use models, the evaluation of the sustainability of given proposals. It will provide a novel contribution to a transport planning practice which has been mostly dealing with analysis of travel behaviour on the one hand and on the other hand with the evaluation of proposed policy interventions, without systematically filling the in-between gap of identifying ways of generating ideas of how to improve the functioning of the existing transport and land use system. The incorporation from the outset of stakeholder and end-user demands will further distinguish it from existing planning support systems, which are often not used precisely because of the lack of this involvement.

Besides innovation in planning, the project will achieve progress in fundamental knowledge on individual activity and mobility behaviour. So far, prism-based accessibility models are based on absolute time. Subjective time, in the form of values of travel time, is not included yet. In addition we can find some studies on changes in travel characteristics in the past. However, these changes are not linked to changes in spatial configurations of land uses and transport nodes. The present project will deal with both these innovative research issues and use the results to feed the planning support system.

The transition effort of this project focuses on improving the integration of transport and land use planning practice. It contends that better transport and land use modelling alone will not help break the current impasse. A new design-centred, stakeholder- and user-oriented planning approach is needed as present methods are either too evaluation oriented, not systematic enough (in the case of design approaches), and/or too technocratic. In particular, the aim of this project is to provide planning practitioners with tools by which they can – in interaction with stakeholders and consistently with individual user behaviour - identify aspects of the existing land use and transport system that can be improved from a sustainable accessibility perspective.

The project started in November 2005. A community of practice has since been established focussing on the development of strategies to achieve sustainable accessibility in the Amsterdam region. As a first step, a protocol of how to effectively link substantive information to the actual plan-making process is being identified and will provide the framework for developing and testing a first prototype of the method in the next months. Second, the measure in which past, similar efforts have (not) succeeded and the factors explaining this are being assessed. Third, data is being collected and structured which will be used to develop the accessibility model.

Participants
University of Amsterdam, University Utrecht, Dienst Infrastructuur Verkeer en Vervoer, Dutch Railways

Projectmanager
University of Amsterdam: Dr.ir. L. Bertollini

For more information, please contact Transumo at info@transumo.nl, +31 79 3470950