Public transport strategy: Minimal service vs. competitor to the car

With regard to public policy for public transport services, two dominant approaches are found: the provision of minimal services to the car-less population, or the provision of a service that competes directly with the car (in terms of time, cost, convenience, etc.). Increased acknowledgement of the need to mitigate traffic growth and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has led to a growing need to shift from the former to the latter, encouraging the use of public transport. This paper sets out to explore whether competitiveness with the car is a priority for the public transport planning of medium-sized European cities, as well as whether the change in European regulation (European Commission, 2007) has managed to contribute to the acceptance of this priority. In this study, we take a closer look at a country undergoing significant regulatory and procedural transformations. An exploratory analysis is conducted regarding plans, actions, and development projects in recent years in four Portuguese municipalities. Relevant planners and transport authorities are interviewed on matters such as how local policies and plans favor public transport; how the planning process was implemented; the actors involved; and the support tools used to achieve the established goals. The findings reveal that relative competitiveness of public transport is considered important by planning practitioners. Nevertheless, other concerns seem to be more timely, such as, providing minimal services, restructuring existing networks, and budget constraints. The results suggest that changes in the planning process have been overwhelming and are seen as restricting the steps required toward making public transport more competitive vis-à-vis the car. So far, local authorities recognize the potential of adding relative competitiveness concerns in the future, as well as the added value of planning support tools capable of revealing such relative competitiveness.

Integrated Decision Support System for Pluvial Flood-Resilient Spatial Planning in Urban Areas

Flood-resilient spatial planning in urban areas involves designing and implementing structural and nonstructural measures. For the latter, urban planners apply a precautionary principle, which is normally not grounded in the actual performance of the urban drainage system (UDS). This approach, however, fails during weather extremes with heavy precipitation. This paper presents a new concept for reducing pluvial flood risks in the urban planning process. The novelty of the developed planning support system named Extreme Weather Layer (EWL) is that it creates dynamic interlinkages between land developments, the performance of UDS, and other factors that contribute to flood risk. The EWL is built on the digital twin of the existing UDS and delivers an easy-to-use concept, where the end user can analyze hydraulic modelling results interlinked with climate scenarios using the GIS platform. This allows planning specialists to consider land use and soil types in the urban environment to simulate the response of the storm water system and the catchments to different rainfall events. This proposed approach was piloted in Haapsalu (Estonia) and Söderhamn (Sweden). The resulting planning support system, which performs as a set of layers within municipalities’ GIS, allows decision makers to understand and predict the impact of various spatial planning decisions on the pluvial flood risk.

Cockpit Social Infrastructure

Web-based geographic information systems (GIS) and planning support systems are widely adopted as digital tools to support planning practices. The respective solutions tend to be isolated implementations aimed at a single planning purpose due to the specific requirement concerning their data, methodology, involved stakeholders etc. With data platforms, GIS infrastructures and the possibility to use web-based software that relies on open standards, creating a planning support infrastructure is more feasible than ever. Such infrastructures can create opportunities for governments to draw on existing systems and create the potential to improve planning practices through enhanced information and analysis. This paper describes the development of the Cockpit Social Infrastructure, a planning application that serves as an interface between Hamburg’s Urban Data Platform and the municipal planners of social infrastructure. Its unique institutional setting as well as its reliance on an open standard software architecture make it a unique case for potential planning support infrastructure.

A game co-design method to elicit knowledge for the contextualization of spatial models

A frequent criticism of knowledge-based planning tools is the apparent mismatch between information frameworks used in their spatial models and the information needs of planning actors. Increasingly, these actors are contributing their context-specific knowledge during the development of such tools. Transferring this knowledge from actors to the model remains a challenge. This study establishes a set of design requirements for knowledge elicitation in small group settings and introduces game co-design as a method allowing planning actors and planning support experts to meet halfway between the technology and user domains in the so-called third space. We present an initial case where in three nominal group sessions, actors encountered and critiqued parameterized assumptions of their planning issues in a tangible game environment. Findings indicate that the method can elicit different types of knowledge (divergence) about a spatial system in operationalized terms (formalization). We discuss the potential of tangible game co-design as a modeling as learning exercise and its complementarity to dedicated digital technologies for more holistic planning support.

Exploring the potential for planning support systems to bridge the research-translation gap between public health and urban planning

Background There is consensus that planning professionals need clearer guidance on the features that are likely to produce optimal community-wide health benefits. However, much of this evidence resides in academic literature and not in tools accessible to the diverse group of professionals shaping our cities. Incorporating health-related metrics into the planning support systems (PSS) provides an opportunity to apply empirical evidence on built environment relationships with health-related outcomes to inform real-world land use and transportation planning decisions. This paper explores the role of planning support systems (PSS) to facilitate the translation and application of health evidence into urban planning and design practices to create healthy, liveable communities. Methods A review of PSS software and a literature review of studies featuring a PSS modelling built environmental features and health impact assessment for designing and creating healthy urban areas was undertaken. Customising existing software, a health impact PSS (the Urban Health Check) was then piloted with a real-world planning application to evaluate the usefulness and benefits of a health impact PSS for demonstrating and communicating potential health impacts of design scenarios in planning practice. Results Eleven PSS software applications were identified, of which three were identified as having the capability to undertake health impact analyses. Three studies met the inclusion criteria of presenting a planning support system customised to support health impact assessment with health impacts modelled or estimated due to changes to the built environment. Evaluation results indicated the Urban Health Check PSS helped in four key areas: visualisation of how the neighbourhood would change in response to a proposed plan; understanding how a plan could benefit the community; Communicate and improve understanding health of planning and design decisions that positively impact health outcomes. Conclusions The use of health-impact PSS have the potential to be transformative for the translation and application of health evidence into planning policy and practice, providing those responsible for the policy and practice of designing and creating our communities with access to quantifiable, evidence-based information about how their decisions might impact community health.