Maria Teresa Borzacchiello

Sustainable Urban Land Use and Transportation Planning: A Cognitive Decision Support System for the Naples Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACT Increasing needs for higher mobility are often met by design and implementation of new infrastructure provisions. The challenging question is whether this choice increases the general political objective of sustainable development. In this context, also the land-use and transportation interfaces have to be envisaged. The article aims to offer a methodological/operational contribution to sustainable mobility policy in the Naples metropolitan area (in the Campania Region1, Italy). Scenario analysis is used to design combined land-use/transportation plans to be assessed from a sustainability perspective. Long-range choice options are evaluated using inter alia a sophisticated multicriteria analysis (i.e., hierarchical Regime method). Sensitivity analyses will test the robustness of policy rank order solutions found by the above multicriteria analysis. 1The case study is part of a test project of the land use/transport laboratory of the Regional Centre of Competence funded by the Campania Region in the Operative Regional Program 2000–2006 (measure 3.13) and coordinated by Prof. Vincenzo Torrieri.

Accessibility and urban development: a grid-based comparative statistical analysis of Dutch cities

Accessibility has become a key issue in modern urban planning. This paper aims to identify the impact of differences in spatial accessibility on the development of the built environment in cities. Using a few simple accessibility indicators, it tries to map out in a quantitative way the detailed implications of accessibility conditions for built-up areas, on the basis of a 25 m × 25 m grid cell approach. The statistical tool used here is logistic regression, followed by a GIS representation of the empirical results for four Dutch cities: Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Utrecht.

An operational information systems architecture for assessing sustainable transportation planning: Principles and design

This paper offers the description of an integrated information system framework for the assessment of transportation planning and management. After an introductory exposition, in the first part of the paper, a broad overview of international experiences regarding information systems on transportation is given, focusing in particular on the relationship between transportation systems performance monitoring and the decision-making process, and on the importance of this connection in the evaluation and planning process, in Italian and European cases. Next, the methodological design of an information system to support efficient and sustainable transportation planning and management aiming to integrate inputs from several different data sources is presented. The resulting framework deploys modular and integrated databases which include data stemming from different national or regional data banks and which integrate information belonging to different transportation fields. For this reason, it allows public administrations to account for many strategic elements that influence their decisions regarding transportation, both from a systemic and infrastructural point of view.

Geo-ICT in Transportation Science

Since the first appearances of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), transportation science has found in them its natural support, to represent, first, the spatial and, later on, the temporal aspects of transportation networks and infrastructures. As GIS developed so did their use in transportation science, and they became essential not only in visualization but also to facilitate and speed data management, algorithmic operations, and decision making. This paper analyses the contributions and influence of GIS in transport science on the basis of three frameworks: geodatabase, geomapping, and geomodelling, all of which highlight the importance of location.