Monday, January 23, 2012

Residential Areas for Households without Cars The Scope for Neighbourhood Mobility Management in Scandinavian Cities

by Jan Scheurer

Ecological housing initiatives have proliferated throughout Scandinavia over the past two decades and fostered groundbreaking innovation in the fields of resource efficiency and the reinvigoration of communities in local areas. The travel patterns of residents in such projects, however, remain largely outside the target and the influence of the policy context, and thus constitute an unpredictable 'wildcard' with the potential to seriously jeopardise the sustainability performance even of an otherwise highly innovative neighbourhood. To overcome such shortfalls, recent experiments in some European cities have attempted to incorporate mobility management components into the concepts of new residential developments. These include restricted or demand-responsive parking provision, on-site car sharing, rent and mobility service packages, and specific designs for live-work arrangements and/or functional integration on a neighbourhood level.
Some of these carfree or car-reduced neighbourhoods have now been completed and inhabited for several years. Their history, leading up to a location-specific mobility concept in each case, and their experience with practical implementation and user compliance now allow to provide a critical review of success and failure in this field, and to draw conclusions on how similar approaches may be applied in Scandinavian cities.

A pedestrian street in old town of Stockholm, photo by Joakim Johansson (Alendri)

A pedestrian street in  Stockholm, photo by Design for Health

more about urban travels:

Urban form, individual spatial footprints, and travel: An examination of space-use behavior

COLLECTING SOCIAL NETWORK DATA TO STUDY SOCIAL ACTIVITY-TRAVEL BEHAVIOUR: AN EGOCENTRIC APPROACH

Transitography 101: The Portland Metro – A Case Study on Regional Government

Neighborhood Design and the Accessibility of the Elderly: An Empirical Analysis in Northern California

OVERVIEW OF LAND-USE TRANSPORT MODELS

Building More Roads Does Not Ease Congestion

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