Guenter Emberger

Optimal Land Use—Transport Strategies: Methodology and Application to European Cities

There has been growing interest in Europe in the development of integrated transport strategies, in which individual policy instruments are combined to complement one another and to achieve improved performance against a given set of policy objectives. This paper applies an optimization procedure to identify optimal strategies for packages of transport policy instruments without, and then with, constraints on finance and targets for global warming and safety. Some exploratory tests have also been carried out on land use strategies, and they are reported here in brief. Results demonstrate that the methodology is robust and can be applied with different transport models and with constraints applied both to policy instruments and to objectives. All optimal strategies found involved substantial reductions in fare levels throughout the study area. Where it was not possible to change fares, the strategies were substantially less effective when measured against the objectives. Most optimal strategies involved in...

The Effects of Appraisal Methodology on the Specification of Optimal Urban Transport Strategies

ABSTRACT The concept of integrated urban land-use and transport strategies has been promoted for more than a decade. In most cases, strategy appraisal is conducted by maximizing some measure of total welfare based on a cost–benefit analysis (CBA). In other cases, a multicriteria approach is adopted whereby monetized and nonmonetized effects are taken together. More recently, there has been a move toward the use of targets at both national and local levels first for monitoring purposes but also for the appraisal of strategies against outcomes. The aim of this paper is to present optimal transport strategies resulting from the application of different appraisal frameworks. We apply and compare a standard CBA appraisal and a target-based approach. We also look at constrained optimization solutions, adding constraints on finance, CO2 emissions, and cost of accidents to the CBA approach. The results are presented and discussed for two UK cities: Edinburgh and Leeds. This research configuration allows us to identify and explain similarities and differences in the optimal strategies and to decide whether they stem from the application of the different appraisal methods or if they are city specific. Our results indicate that there is a discrepancy between the targets set and the monetary values used in the CBA approach. When constrained to meet certain targets, the impact on policy can be significant; in the extreme case, it can reverse the policy for capacity increases. The constrained CBA approach can find solutions that maximize welfare while satisfying the targets, but this still leaves open the issue of whether targets and monetary values can be set that are consistent with one another.

Can Decision Making Processes Benefit from a User Friendly Land Use and Transport Interaction Model

Policy instruments, Flight simulator Abstract: transport and land use developments. Decision making in this context is a challenging task which was explored in detail in a series of research projects. To support decision making, tools were developed to reduce the risk of inappropriate decisions in the land use and transport context. One of these tools is MARS (Metropolitan Activity Relocation Simulator); an integrated dynamic land use and transport model. The paper presented here focuses therefore on two main issues: 1) the introduction of the decision support tool MARS and of the cause-effect relations between the land-use and the transport system implemented within MARS and 2) the design and application of the MARS flight simulator (MARS FS) as a graphical user interface for MARS especially designed to the needs of decision makers. Urban regions today face serious challenges caused by past and ongoing Land-use and transport model, Dynamic modelling, Decision-making support,

Low carbon transport strategy in Europe: A critical review

ABSTRACT The purposes of this article are to depict ongoing trends regarding the transport system in Europe, to introduce readers to the challenges that Europe (and the rest of the world) will face in the future, to show which strategies Europe plans to deploy to mitigate the negative impacts the transport system imposes on the overall system, and finally to discuss the potential of these suggested strategies to contribute to the objectives of the European Union in the long run.

Optimization of Transport Strategies

The application of formal optimization in identifying optimal combinations of a set of policy instruments has been demonstrated through the case studies that were present in this chapter. In doing so, the development of an objective function, and the ways in which financial constraints can be imposed, have also been illustrated in the chapter. The chapter has shown how policy instruments can be defined as continuous variables, within acceptable ranges, and allowed to vary by time of day or over time. The application has been illustrated with one transport model and one optimization routine, but two other routines that can be applied have also been described. While most of the results presented come directly from the optimization process, it also shows how sensitivity tests can be used to provide a richer understanding of the contribution of different instruments. The chapter has demonstrated that the use of response surfaces as a way of enhancing that understanding in different areas.

Urban Transport in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

The purpose of the study was to investigate arising future challenges of the transport system in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in the light of a very strong population growth (legal and illegal migration), a strong trend from non-motorised transport to motorised individual transport, a fast transition from motor scooter based individual transport towards a car based individual transport (Ackermann et al., Abschlusbericht zur Verkehrserhebung – SrV-Ho Chi Minh City 1996. Dresden, Technische Universitat Dresden, 1997; Georget, Ho Chi Minh City – Transport modeling in a rapid growth environment – Cube Voyager Model MVA, 2009) and all with these developments related negative impacts on the environment and public health. To support the authorities in HCMC, TU Vienna, Institute of Transportation, was setting up an integrated land use and transport interaction model called MARS (Metropolitan Activity Relocation Simulator) (Emberger et al., Method to identify optimal land use and transport policy packages: a comparison of CBA and indicator based optimisation. In: Proceedings European Conference on Transport 2003, Strasbourg, 2003; Pfaffenbichler, The strategic, dynamic and integrated urban land use and transport model MARS (Metropolitan Activity Relocation Simulator) – development, testing and application. Institute for Transport Planning and Traffic Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, p 274, 2003) in close collaboration with experts from the HCMC University of Transport and the Transport Development and Strategy Institute (TDSI), Ministry of Transport of SR. Vietnam (MOT). With this model it was possible to quantify and assess the effects of potential transport strategies on land use, environment and economy for a time period of 30 years. The results of this research exercise are presented in the following text.

Editorial: Special Issue on Current Trend and Development of Sustainable Transport Research in Europe

The concept of sustainable development has gradually become a focus of attention in the transport planning field in recent years. This is due to the wave of concerns over the issues of global warming (or climate change), environmental damage, and limited energy resources. The Brundtland report defines sustainable development as development that meets the need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The key driving force of traditional transport planning has mainly been limited to economics development without a full consideration of social and environmental aspects. As a result, the transport systems in many major cities consume an excessive amount of energy and resources and damage the local and global environment. It has also been found that the lifestyle and the urban development in most major cities influenced by the transport system, especially in the developed countries, are not sufficiently sustainable. This raises concern for governments, local authorities, and transport planners to reform their views and approaches toward transport planning to address the issue of sustainable development. This special issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation aims to provide an update on the recent research and development in the area of sustainable transport planning in Europe. Since the Brundtland report was first published in 1987, the topic of sustainable transport has been at the center of the discussion at the local, national, and regional levels in Europe. At the European level, the European Commission has put a high priority on this area, and a fruitful number of EU research projects and thematic networks in this area have since emerged (some of these studies are reported in this special issue). The key outcomes from these European studies are the realization of the need to shift from car use to other more efficient travel modes, complexity and interdependency of transport planning and other sectors (e.g., land use and environmental planning), and the requirement of an integrated transport strategy to tackle the sustainability problem. The four papers selected for this special