Kunskapsläge och kunskapsbrister när det gäller samspelet mellan stads-byggnad, fysisk planering, transporter och trafik och de sociala och ekonomiska verkningarna på individ och hushållsnivå

Report, 2012

Abstract This report is a state of the art study on possible innovative policies and future research need in the field of integrated urban land-use and transport planning whit special regard to socioeconomic consequences. The report covers technical planning design aspect as well as behavioral and institutional issues of land use transport interaction from local to urban regional level, i.e. • “What questions” like impacts of local and regional land use policies on mobility, accessibility and mode choice and, vise versa, impacts of transport policies on the location of households and firms. • “How questions” like potentials and problems of co-ordination of land use and transport policies in the Nordic local, regional and national institutional context. That urban land use and transport are closely inter-linked is a common wisdom among planners and the public – it is not hard to see that the spatial separation of human activities creates the need for travel and goods transportation. And this is also the underlying principles in theories and models. Knowledge about “urban traffic – a function of land use” is good on urban and regional level. Levels of car ownership and use; transit service and use; and infrastructure for walking and biking, varies widely and systematic among cities because of the land use pattern. There is however a lack of knowledge on the local level – where the everyday building of the cities is going on, and that is a huge policy problem. Investors and politicians need answers to the question: How do different density levels (persons/ha) helps to shape a significant change in travel patterns? Knowledge, theories and models on the reverse impact - from transport to land use - are week and almost absent. Some vague understanding exists on “transport technology eras”: the evolution from the dense medieval urban fabric where all mobility where on foot, to today’s sprawled urban and metropolitan areas whit massive volumes of motorized travel and problematic car dependence. How development of urban transport systems influence the localization decisions of investor, firms and households is not understood in term of theories and usable models and tools. But it is quite clear that high capacity in the more peripheral part of the urban and regional transport network will result in a more dispersed settlement structure, which is another huge policy problem because of the extreme dependence on the car. How will peak oil and polices that rise the cost for using cars in urban areas affect accessibility for different socioeconomic groups? Will parts of the sprawled building stock be obsolete?