Testing urban sustainability policies for transport
The SPARTACUS system is a strategic urban planning system, which can be used for policy formulation of urban transport and corresponding testing of different measures, such as investment, regulatory and pricing, evaluating sustainability in the urban environment. It focuses on the interactions between transport, land use, economy, environment, and social factors, with the effects of policy options presented as indicators, background variable values and indices for the environment, economy and social aspects of sustainability. The system comprises of the MEPLAND land use and transport model, combined with a set of urban sustainability indicators, the GIS based RASTER method with the MEPLUS post-processing tool calculating the indicators, and the USE-IT decision support tool evaluating the results of policy options based on the weighted indicator values. It is currently available for testing or assessment. The SPARTACUS system has been employed in the metropolitan area of Naples and Vicenza, in order to assess different sustainable urban transport policies. It was implemented to support the Master Transport Plan and the Master Traffic Plan of Naples and Vicenza respectively. In Naples, the robustness and flexibility of the system was verified, allowing measurements of the impact of the adoption of different policies and investments on factors such as location of households and economic activities, accessibility of zones and volume and distribution of traffic flows. In Vicenza, the location of different household types, economic activities and land uses were examined, presenting the interaction between these factors with variable input-output coefficients. Detailed design of the urban road network, as well as local parking supply was simulated, reproducing demand reaction to regulatory and pricing policies, and provision of park and ride facilities for the city centre. The example of the two cities demonstrates the wide applicability of this tool in diverse urban contexts, for the evaluation of different policies of urban sustainability in a systematic way.
