Journal of Urban Mobility最新文献

Experimentation, and street experiments in particular, have led to considerable academic and policy advances in sustainable and inclusive (mobility) planning over the past years. With increased popularity and confidence, the street experiments field has recently begun to turn to in-depth discussions on design and upscaling, more than questions of its own legitimacy or relevance. This commentary nevertheless explores four recurring critiques of (street) experimentation and proposes how looking more deeply at them might empower, rather than weaken, such initiatives. Engaging with these critiques is therefore not meant as a renewed criticism, per se, of (street) experiments. Rather, it recognizes that getting into the technicalities and specific designs and elements that might improve street experiments and their capacity to impact change advances knowledge in the field, but argues that advocates must not forget some key baseline critiques they might face - and be ready to either defend or amend their choices accordingly. This commentary is a call to be more creative and less conforming, and to come back again to the deeper motivations for what (street) experiments are meant to do; or develop a better understanding of those motivations. This commentary also leaves open questions that will require further research. Disconfirming some of the hypotheses emerging here would be no less interesting than confirming them. I hope the readers will thus see this commentary as an invitation for debating and exploring these critiques and reflections further.

Promoted by sustainable urban agendas and urged by global pandemic measures, street experiments (SE) are booming in Europe but remain latent in Asia. These experiments aim to reconfigure streets as more than spaces for motorized traffic movements, enabling a temporary urban paradigm shift. Such a shift involves balancing active mobility and public space uses in streets while envisioning radically different settings and uses. Recently, eminent scholars urged considering SE in connection to the system and planning framework within which SE are conceived to trace their trajectories. This article examines four decades of temporary-pedestrianization policies and planning instruments in Hong Kong, an Asian city representative of high-density urban environments with highly intensive use of road space and conservative and prescriptive planning. In doing so, the article identifies four trajectories and illustrates two emblematic cases: Chater Road, the first street temporarily pedestrianized under a commercial initiative, and Sai Yeung Choi Street South, a street pedestrianized under a government initiative, now turned back to its original function. The competing roles and practical uses that pedestrianized streets must fulfil partially determined their fate. However, the trajectories these cases followed also differ due to the contextual planning approach and decision-making process. The study contributes to scholarship on SE by shedding new light on the geographical context of high-density urban Asia, forwarding challenges that policymakers might need to address in the planning and governance of SE in similar environments.

In June 2020 the Local Council Association (LCA) in Malta launched the ‘Slow Streets’ action plan to promote active travel and use public transport, while at the same time provide information to reduce mobility. This paper explores people's perceptions and opinions towards this action plan, and the opportunities and challenges perceived and anticipated experiences in the future implementation of it. To do this we use two qualitative datasets: people's perceptions from 84 semi-structured interviews and an N focus group amongst stakeholders. The semi-structured interviews were conducted between February 2022 and April 2022 by intercepting people in the streets of six localities that showed interest in being part of the action plan. The online focus group was conducted in February 2022. The findings show that 66 % of the resident participants were not aware of the action plan, which is of concern when considering the topic of stakeholder involvement. From the qualitative analysis three main themes emerged: car culture, safety and policy. People agreed that there should be permanent interventions to reduce car use. Both stakeholder groups agreed that urban areas should have safe environments for children to play, and engage in sustainable mobility and healthier lifestyles.

Planning infrastructures and services for sustainable urban mobility is one of the main challenges for European cities. Following these principles, in March 2022, Omitted for blind peer review and the Omitted for blind peer review built a new public space for children in a dismissed parking area located near to a middle school, using the approach of tactical urban planning and participatory design. In this context, this study proposes a methodology for the integration of long term camera-based monitoring for the assessment of temporary streets experiments. The method differs from previous work from literature in its continuous and systematic approach, fostering the implementation of large scale quantitative methodologies in urban interventions. The area was the subject of an extended mobility study with the objective to monitor pedestrian and vehicular flows through video analytics techniques and to detail specific patterns of space use during the pre/ post-intervention phases (data collected over two months). The results of the analyses were processed in order to: (i) identify the activation times of the study area, through metrics describing cumulative pedestrian density and cumulative dwell time; (ii) characterize the relative uses of the study areas following the plaza redevelopment. Results revealed a 43 % growth in the cumulative dwell time recorded in the area following the redevelopment intervention. New use characteristics related to furniture in the plaza emerged, with the most significant cumulative dwell times increase being recorded around these spots. The results presented in this research have made it possible to quantify the effectiveness of the proposed urban regeneration intervention, confirming the use of sensors and innovative analysis technologies to support the iterative design process of urban regeneration interventions.

Quantification of traffic dynamics is a valuable tool for city planning and management. Metrics such as the vehicle average speed, travel time, delays, and count of stops, can be used to characterize mobility and traffic congestion in an area. However, effective study of mobility data is often hindered by the difficulty of gathering mobility data in a practical, inexpensive, and prompt way.

In this work, we explore the use of city buses as mobility probes, using the existing smart city infrastructure deployed in Aveiro, Portugal. We propose a method for traffic congestion detection considering the low vehicle speed, low traffic flow and road occupancy close to its capacity. Three degrees of congestion are identified using the k-means approach; DBSCAN is used to characterize the typical level of congestion in a road. Using four-weeks of mobility data, it was possible to assess the congestion along the day and for the different days of the week; some road segments proved to be consistently prone to congestion. We also studied parameters of driving safety, considering speed and acceleration.

In this work, we show that knowledge discovery can be applied to mobility data being collected by tracking buses, exploring data that is often collected for other purposes also to characterize traffic congestion. These methods can inform decision makers and are easily ported to other cities.

The creation and design of intervention for street experimentation is in itself a key challenge in sustainable urban mobility to effectively encourage a modal shift from high car dependence to more active, non-polluting modes of transport. Understanding the needs of the community, including the diverse stakeholders at play, is crucial in implementing successful street experiments that can ultimately manifest into more permanent and systemic change. This study aims to address a current gap between stakeholders and the community in the street experimentation process within the context of the principal urban area of Malta, a car-dependent Euro-Mediterranean island. By collecting initial input from the community and several key stakeholders, a virtual platform to engage the local community is created; a virtual urban living lab (VULL). The VULL is tested in a workshop setting as a method for the collection and visualisation of data in the process of street experimentation. The VULL offers an interactive space for participants to identify barriers that discourage walking and explore and evaluate ideas of street experimentation for the local urban environment. A discussion of preliminary findings from the community's direct input and feedback sheds light on the benefits and challenges of using virtual platforms for stakeholder and community participation in the street experimentation process. The paper concludes by proposing VULLs as a valuable tool for city leaders, urban planners and designers to effectively engage with stakeholders and test new solutions to the complex and pressing issues of urban mobility and public space.

Vehicle emissions have been identified as a cause of air pollution and one of the major reasons why air quality in many large German cities such as Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg, Cologne or Munich does not meet EU-wide limits. As a result, in the recent past, judicial driving bans on diesel vehicles have been imposed in many places since those vehicles emit critical pollutant groups. For the increasing urban population, the challenge is whether and how a change of the modal split in favor of the more environmentally and climate-friendly public transport can be achieved.

This paper presents the case of the Federal City of Bonn, one of five model cities sponsored by the German federal government that are testing measures to reduce traffic-related pollutant emissions by expanding the range of public transport services on offer. We present the results of a quantitative survey (N = 14,296) performed in the Bonn/Rhein-Sieg area and the neighboring municipalities as well as the ensuing logistic regressions confirming that a change in individual mobility behavior in favor of public transport is possible through expanding services. Our results show that individual traffic could be reduced, especially on the city's main traffic axes. To sustainably improve air quality, such services must be made permanently available.

Feeling safe is a major issue for cyclists, and some potential cyclists are still deterred from using the bicycle because they feel too unsafe. Assessing the subjective safety of existing cycling infrastructures and locations can be done by questionnaires that show pictures of infrastructures and ask participants for their safety ratings. However, future cycling infrastructures should also be evaluated as safe even before they are implemented. Therefore, it is desirable to have a method that is able to predict safety from infrastructural information. This study aims to propose two different ways for such a method and to test both ways in a use case. We first developed two scores, namely the Repertory Grid (RG) Score and the FixMyBerlin (FMB) Score, which predict subjective safety from objective environmental information but use different data bases and different methodologies. In a second step, we validated these scores by comparing them to questionnaire ratings that evaluated cyclists’ subjective safety at 20 locations in the city of Braunschweig, Germany. Finally, we compared the two scores as well as the questionnaire ratings with objective safety measures, namely crash statistics, at the respective locations. The results show that the RG Score has a moderate agreement and the FMB Score has a fair agreement with the questionnaire ratings. All methods agree on the overall safety evaluation of various cycling facilities. However, the RG Score showed less variance in the safety ratings, whereas the FMB Score rated most locations more unsafe than the participants in the questionnaire. Interestingly, neither the scores nor the questionnaire ratings could sufficiently deduce the occurrence of a crash at one of the locations. The findings strengthen the importance of subjective safety as a construct independent of objective safety. Furthermore, they provide insights into aspects of subjective safety that can easily be measured by objective scores, and into aspects that are important for cyclists but were not yet covered by the scores. This study, therefore, provides a basis for future considerations and future evaluation methods to assess the subjective safety of cyclists.

Building on the literature concerning gender-responsive mobility, this paper aims to explore how street experiments can be used to promote gendered mobilities and create streetscapes in order to prioritise the needs of women in the improvement of access to public transport that grants them access to the many facets of urban life. It argues that by creating more inclusive and accessible streets through participatory planning and design processes, women will have greater opportunities to participate in and benefit from public transport. To that end, a street experiment project, TOPUK, was used as a case study focusing on improving women's access to public transport in Maltepe, Istanbul. The methodology consists of the critical assessment of various participation methods and a detailed narrative of the project process. Accessibility, mobility, and safety were found to be the most important women-centric public transportation issues addressed through participatory pop-up design solutions at the street level, most of which were implemented despite bureaucratic obstacles. The paper concludes with a discussion of the lessons learned from the TOPUK project and how these lessons can be applied to future street experiments to create more gender-responsive and inclusive living environments.

This paper argues that the right to access public spaces and streets is impacted not only because of automobility but also by socio-spatial factors of the urban environment. This paper presents insights towards a holistic understanding for street experiments (with a focus on stationary and slow travel modes) by highlighting the factors that impact the conditions of mobility and access through the lens of gender. By adopting a combination of new technologies, such as GPS, along with mobile methods, like ethnography, this research centres around the everyday travel experiences of urban marginalized women (UMW) from peri‑urban areas of New Delhi who contest their right to access public spaces on a day-to-day basis. This study examines the socio-spatial environment comprising the daily mobilities of UMW to reveal the conditions of mobility and access to public spaces. The findings highlight that the issues faced by these women while travelling, mainly guided by aspects of gender, act as barriers to their mobility and access to public spaces (streets) in urban informal conditions. The study also reveals elements of urban informality (socio-spatial elements) enhance as well as negatively on the daily mobilities of UMW. These socio-spatial factors were found to be interconnected to one another and thus cannot be implemented as individual or isolated factors. The results of the study support the proposal of a more inclusive and accessible public space.