Developing a design-support tool to integrate urban and public transport planning towards sustainable urban development.

Research Project, 2022 – 2024

A fundamental obstacle to achieving sustainable urban development is the current divide between urban planning and transport planning in both research and practice. To transform our cities towards sustainability, it is not enough to design walkable neighborhoods, increase public transport coverage and frequency, or limit vehicular traffic and reduce emissions. These silo approaches run the risk of sub-optimizing different transport systems separately, while not solving the conflicts created by their integration in real urban environments, nor taking advantage of their complementarity potentials, to promote more efficient, safe, inclusive, and sustainable multi- and intermodal mobility. In this regard, this postdoctoral project aims to develop a project support tool that integrates the public transport perspective to urban planning best practices. This integration tool will be built through the modeling of multimodal urban network systems, and the development of measures of centrality and accessibility of multimodal and intermodal networks, capable of capturing movement patterns at different urban scales.  The tool will be developed and tested using Python and R packages from the GIS-T community, offering flexibility for its manipulation, and implementation. 
The postdoctoral project, funded by the Area of Advance/SFO Transport, Chalmers University of Technology, will be completed in 2024. The responsible postdoctoral researcher is Flávia Lopes, Spatial Morphology Group (SMoG), Division of Urban Design and Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering (ACE). Associate professors Jorge Gil, and Gianna Stavroulaki (SMoG, ACES) will supervise the project.