Resarch areas

Three factors to combine to create what may be termed as a strategic decision-making and planning process are identified by researchers at VTI. The three factors can be summarized as long-term visions for the town’s development, long- and short-term actions, and public support for the long-term vision.

The way buildings are positioned relative to the design of traffic systems influences the public’s travel patterns and their choice of transport mode. It is therefore important that building layout and traffic are coordinated in order to create sustainable mobility. Sustainable mobility is an umbrella term for measures that reduce the number and length of car journeys and the need to travel at all. The aim of this study is to shed light on the conditions under which local authorities coordinate building development and traffic issues with respect to sustainable mobility.

This investigation is based upon a pair of case studies, and examines the handling of building and traffic issues during the planning of two residential areas, one in Lund and one in Trelleborg. The study analyses how coordination between these two areas has been influenced by, for example, political interest and public support for a more sustainable transport system, and the distribution of tasks and responsibilities within the local administration, as well as the methods used to achieve coordination and to create mutual understanding between politicians and officials.

The case study findings show that circumstances differ when it comes to the local authorities’ coordination of building and traffic issues. In Lund – with its public support for sustainable mobility, politicians’ and officials’ general agreement on longterm urban planning goals, workable planning structures, and mechanisms to achieve consensus between the parties concerned – conditions were favourable to coordination of public transport and building planning. In Trelleborg there was less coordination between traffic and building planning, which among other things resulted in less propitious conditions for public transport. One explanation for this is the fact that public transport did not have an obvious role to play in the realization of Trelleborg’s long-term development goals.

The results show that where coordination has worked, three factors have combined to create what may be termed a strategic decision-making and planning process. The three factors can be summarized as (i) long-term visions for the town’s development, (ii) long- and short-term actions, and (iii) public support for the long-term vision. The first factor concerns the way in which building and traffic issues relate to conceptions of future urban development. To achieve long-term climate and energy goals, such conceptions should be based on the principles of sustainable mobility. It is important that coordination is made a tool for the implementation of planning policy. The second factor concerns how the vision is turned into concrete, long-term and short-term actions. Politicians and officials must be in agreement if real influence is to be brought to bear on actual decision-making and planning processes. Swedish local authorities should therefore develop mechanisms to enhance mutual understanding between politicians and officials on the basic principles of sustainable mobility. This becomes especially important whenever it is necessary to change the underlying systems of thought that hinder greater coordination. In addition, the long-term vision for urban development should be clearly formulated in strategic plans, and the structure of those plans should form a framework that supports work on a variety of levels. The third factor concerns public support. Without public support it becomes hard to make the occasionally difficult political decisions that affect the public’s travel behaviour. Public support can also be a driving force behind the realization of political decisions.

Clear trunk line structure with integration between local and regional networks in a hierarchical system, high priority and accessibility in a physical sense, and an elaborate connection to town planning and land use at both local and regional level are the planning principles which should be followed to secure that the resources allocated to public transport will provide the greatest possible positive impact on the region's development. In order to realize such an outcome, there is need for a clear regional and local integrated transport planning which includes infrastructure, operations and management and how traffic should be used as a tool for local and regional policy objectives.

This report aims to improve knowledge and decision making for more efficient use of public transport as a development tool. The discussion is based on the state of knowledge in public transport-related economic research with a focus on local and regional development and accessibility and mobility. The report is mostly a research review of published research, primarily from research on public transport economics and planning dimensions.

The research results discussed have been selected on the basis of relevance to the aim of the study and the need to increase the knowledge base for integrated regional and local public transport systems. There is a clear demand from the emerging regions for more input in the work of developing clear strategies on how public transport can be used as a tool for regional development and sustainable growth.

The economic research on regions and cities high-lights a number of conditions described as central to economic growth in post-industrial economies. Examples of such conditions are the importance of agglomerations and clusters, differentiation and specialization, the service sectors´ growing importance for employment, regional innovation systems and last but not least, the ability of cities and regions to be attractive and offer residents good living conditions. One important implication of this is that the economic transformation towards growth and development is becoming more and more dependent on the availability of dense physical space. Therefore, cities and regions will be drivers of growth.

All these conditions can be linked to opportunities for travel, transport, mobility and accessibility. This in turn means that public transport can be linked to these driving forces for economic development in terms of mobility and accessibility in general, but also more directly to the characteristics that public transport has in relation to other modes of transport. Public transport has a high capacity with a relatively limited demand for space. Therefore, public transport can be used to achieve the dense clusters which are prerequisites to exploit agglomeration economies, to realize economies of scale and contribute to favourable production conditions for the growing service sector.

In combination with the fact that public transport is often more environmentally sustainable than private car use, it can be assumed that it is public transport’s potential as a development tool that explains the increasing political interest of public transport in many countries in recent decades. The former quite so one-dimensional discussion of the role of public transport for regional expansion and matching in the labour market has today been replaced by a more complex view of the development potential. There is surprisingly little research on the economic consequences of public transport measures on growth and development with a profound empirical base. The economic research in this area is focused on accessibility, more generally, measured in travel time and often related to the impact of infrastructure investments. This means that there is a great need for more empirical research on the effects of the measures that may arise in the planning of local and regional public transport.

Attempts to empirically establish the link between a region's economic growth and public transport supply suggest a weak, or non-existing, link. A contributing factor to explain this in the Swedish context is that there is no region that systematically and consistently uses public transport as a development tool for sustainable growth. The main function of public transport is to serve as a complement to private car that dominates as the transport mode in Swedish regions and cities.

Such integrated transport planning is almost non-existing in Sweden. The trend towards a more explicit regional level, with changes in responsibilities between different tiers of government, leads to the need for a more comprehensive planning and decision support for public transport. The new regional authorities will need to know how public transport should be planned and integrated into a region-wide perspective, both in terms of planning guidelines and the planning tools that can be used. A key issue will be public transport relations to urban development and land use in general. Here, the municipalities have the main responsibility and the current change in roles of responsibility in public transport with regional public transport authorities can cause problems on the basis of that aspect.

Many initiatives are emerging with the objective of developing models and perspectives for planning and governance of regional and local public transport. The national authorities and industry stakeholders are together commissioned to release guidelines for new transport strategy programs to be established by the new regional transport authorities as a result of the public transport legislation soon in power.

Much stronger strategic dimension is needed in the planning of public transport. What matter are transport system development, operation and management, and how public transport should be used as a tool for regional development aimed at sustainable growth. In planning, several changes, measures and quality levels should be evaluated, and applied perspectives must be wider than to focus solely on infrastructure investments.

From the discussion follows that the spatial dimension is becoming increasingly important for economic development. Urban development, regional context, and how land use and transport interact should be lifted into the core of public transport planning. Regardless of the level of resources allocated to public transport, it is important that the resources are used to the best advantage. If sustainable economic development is prioritised, planning and governance of public transport should be changed in the direction discussed in the report.

A number of Swedish authorities have since the beginning of the 1990s introduced a range of methods in order to be able to put customer needs in focus. The Swedish Road Administration (SRA) is one of them. In 2003 SRA introduced a “customer-oriented” way of working. This means that the work management system was adapted in order to better guide SRA in the direction of what they call greater “customer benefit”. The head office has also created a number of institutionalized so-called “customer capture methods” which the planners in the regional offices are to use. Some examples of these institutionalized methods are for instance market surveys, national measurements of the satisfaction of the citizens with the work of SRA and the standard of the roads – so-called Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI). The research project “Regional planners’ view of their customers’ began in autumn 2007 in order to answer questions about how regional transport planners handle customer needs and which methods they use when they create knowledge of customer needs. 15 planners with different responsibilities in three of SRA’s regional offices have been interviewed and a range of business management documents have been analysed.

The results of the interviews show that planners experience problems when using the result of the so called customer capture methods in a regional and local context. The planners for example feel that they cannot use these methods for solving problems of representativeness. The interviews with the planners at SRA show how they wrestle with the question of who are representative of the citizens and what they want. By collecting and systematizing wishes they try to differentiate between what are general “needs” and what the “subjective” wish of an individual is. For this purpose the planners have methods such as CSI and the customer-case system Kundskap, intended to ensure objectivity. The planners find it difficult, however, to use these methods to pin down good representativity and they therefore question the usefulness of the methods. In their daily work personal contacts with customers, e.g. various meetings, written information, phone calls and emails are more important. These contacts are also used to operationalize and interpret results from general surveys such as e.g. CSI and image measurements.

In summary:
• Regional and local dialogues are more important than the institutionalized so-called “customer capture methods”.
• Existing “customer capture methods” should be developed with regard to the systematic use of interpretation and representativeness.
• Improvement on knowledge transfer between regions is needed.
• A continued focus on methods that consist of group dialogue with clients in the form of operation consultation boards, haulier consultation groups is important.
• The regional customer work could usefully become more prevalent and outreach through a seasonally adjusted information.

This report is based on a literature review, compiled research and development results on how parking conditions affect transportation choices. The report also discusses parking as a planning area, measures in parking policies, consequences for urban transport and urban development, and the need for overall parking strategies and plans linked to the traffic and urban planning in general.

The parking market works in practice poorly in most cities. The cost to park is more or less consciously subsidized and distributed to a large extent on rents, property prices, commodity prices, wages, etc. in a non-transparent manner. Those who park their cars are rarely able to weigh their own benefit of parking against the actual cost of providing the parking lot. Demand for parking in cities is therefore artificially high, in an economic sense. It is not unusual that there are direct anomalies in the market such as residential parking fees in combination with by employers provided free parking which makes it profitable to move the car from home to work during daytime, with obvious implications for the mode choice. Subsidization also means that those who do not use the car parks often, or not at all, subsidize those who use the parking lot.

To have the intended effect of policies and measures concerning parking, it is therefore essential to pass on as much of the parking supply as possible to the open parking market where prices reflect the actual costs. With a consumer-driven balance between supply and demand as a base, different parking policies can be formulated to affect urban traffic volumes and modal shares. The literature review shows that parking measures are quite central to influence mode choices in urban transport. A city-wide transport strategy or a transport plan are not complete as long as parking is not supported on the same level as other parts of the city's transport system.

Parking market is divided into different segments, which is an important prerequisite for parking policies. The efficient functioning of visitor parking can have a significant positive impact on urban economic development. Parking policies should be directed to achieve optimal capacity utilization, minimize search traffic and avoid blocking long-term parking. The price elasticity of visitor parking is low and the rate does not affect the choice to visit the inner city to any great extent in medium sized and large cities with attractive centre areas. On the contrary, a properly designed policy for visitor parking will allow more visitors into the inner city.

The conditions of parking are very important for individuals' choice of transport mode for journeys to work. If an employer offers free parking, or low parking fees, a large proportion of the employees will use the car to work. If the opposite is the case, a larger proportion will cycle, walk or use public transport. Surveys show that mode choices can vary significantly between sites with broadly similar location but with different opportunities for the employees to park. As long as there are plenty of cheap or free parking spaces there are only limited possibilities to influence modal choice by means of measures such as improved public transport, better conditions for walking and cycling, etc. However, if the supply of parking space is limited and/or fees are raised, generally the effect on mode choice is large. Parking policy through changes in supply and price of parking at the workplace is therefore an area of great potential to influence the modal share and traffic volumes in urban areas.

Car parks for residents should be provided in parking facilities. Revenue collection should be based on a fixed price for a longer period of time, e.g. a month, not to give incentives to move the car during the day. Minimum parking standards for real estate constructions build in car use and parking needs in the city following historical patterns and force low-frequency car park users to subsidize other people's car parks by housing costs. Options that maximize the amount of parking lots and enhance flexible use of the available supply should be applied on a wider scale.

The literature shows that traffic strategies and transport plans are not complete as long as parking is not dealt with on the same level and with the same ambitions as other parts of the city's transport system, such as car traffic and public transport. Decided goals concerning changed modal split, increased travel by public transport, walking and cycling, targets for inner city development and growth, etc. must be based on a properly designed parking policy to be realized. This conclusion is even more important if the starting point is a wide range of free or cheap, subsidized parking spaces spread out in the city, as is often the case.

The purpose of this research review of gender dimensions within research of municipal planning is to learn from previous studies as a new field of research is being established, namely gender and climate mitigation and adaptation.

Research on gender and urban planning in Sweden during the last 40 years has focused on four different themes: housing, civil rights to participate and influence political decisions, safety issues and planning and planning practices. A fifth theme is included in this review, managing risks and crises, because of its relevance for research on climate mitigation and adaptation.

Research on housing has led to discussions about ways of designing houses in favor of women’s needs and has questioned the isolation of the nuclear family. Women’s experiences have been the core interest, while men’s experiences have been neglected.

Considering the question of civil rights to participate and influence political decisions, research emanating from this perspective has raised questions about whether an increased participation from civil women in the practice of planning would have substantial or preferable effects on the results. Researchers have argued that including women in the process broadens the represented perspectives. Women are, however, partly represented as a homogenous group.

Research on safety issues and gender has had a big influence on the practice of planning. Implications of focusing on women’s fear are discussed; e.g. that women are depicted as frightened. How to shed light on the fear of women without supporting stereotypes is thus a question debated among researchers. Circumstances of men’s fear are not investigated.

Research on planning and planning practices are widespread. One dilemma within planning that is highlighted through research is that planners often use images of a more equal society when planning today’s society (where inequalities still exists). A risk is thus that planning is consolidating inequality. The alternative is that planners should help women and men to live more equal lives in the society of today. Furthermore, there seems to be a tendency of neglecting gendered impacts of the built environment and reproducing images of men and women as different.

Within the field of crises management, risk and gender, gender as a social and cultural construction has been acknowledged. Gender is seen as an important principle when managing crises and risks on an individual as well as an organizational level. However, the research is not particularly extensive. More knowledge about gendered aspects of how men and women are affected by crisis and how organizations in charge of crisis management are characterized as well as how risks are defined and valued is called for.

To sum up, the result from the research review encourages further research that broadens the picture of both the multiple lives of women and men and likewise illustrates multiple family forms. This research can challenge the notion of men and women as homogeneous groups. Studies of the construction and re-construction of gender as a social and cultural category may further develop this field. An intersectional perspective on urban planning may also visualize how gender, ethnicity, family, sexuality, age and class intersect and contribute to various forms of exclusion.