Jan-Dirk Schmöcker

Department of Urban Management

Department of Civil and Earth Resources Engineering

Urban Planning and Transportation Network Analysis – An Introduction

Scope of Urban Planning at KU

• To promote knowledge to create safe, comfortable and sustainable cities.

• General research themes of urban planning laboratories:

– To develop comprehensive and practical methodologies for infrastructure design and management.

– These methodologies are then used to assess potential future scenarios and to develop policy suggestions.

• Given the complexity of our societies and wide ranging impacts of urban planning policies, a broad range of skills and knowledge is required: – Operations research, Geography, Economy (micro- and macro),

Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy … 2

Why focus on urban problems?

• Cities (= density) create unique opportunities • Better access to goods

• Better access to jobs and services

• Better access to information

• Interaction, entertainment

• But cities create competition leading to problems • Various capacity bottlenecks

• Pollution

• Desire for scarce space

• …

• ..all of which require better transportation networks

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Transportation Systems

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• Often mentioned keywords in “Masterplans”:

– Accessible (interchanges, entering/exiting, local/global)

– Reliable (travel time, terminal, capacity, …)

– Sustainable (air/ noise pollution, land-use dynamics)

– Efficient (speed, appropriate capacity, comfort)

– Safe (accidents, crime)

Transportation Systems

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• Solution approaches:

– Creating additional capacity

– Traffic Management and ITS

– Pricing policies

– Promotion of sustainable modes

– Enforcement

– Integrated Land-Use Policies

– Contingency plans

– …

Research Example: Developing A Methodology to assess PT Reliability

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• Specific Problem: Overcrowded trains and buses

• Decision makers need tools to estimate the effect of their solution approach

Problem: Limited Capacity

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• Passengers might not get onto the service because of overcrowding – But react to the overcrowding by adopting

(complex) routing strategies

• Model objective: Develop a simple assignment approach applicable to large scale networks considering – Absolute capacity of services

– Passenger`s routing strategies

Outline of methodology

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• Assume that passengers consider in their route choice: – On-board travel time – (Strategy dependent) waiting time – Risk-aversion of being unable to board

• Introduction of time intervals

varying levels of congestion

• Search for equilibrium re-routing of passengers.

London inner zone case study

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Final Comments

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• Transit Assignment with capacity constraints is one example for new methodologies developed as part of Urban Planning research.

• Subsequent research should discuss recommendations and policy implications,

– e.g. change of service details and its various implications.

• For this urban planners often interact with various organisations and interest groups.

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Thank you for listening