The SPARTACUS system for the assessment of urban sustainable transport policies is operational in the Naples metropolitan area. It includes:
-A set of urban sustainability indicators.
-The MEPLAN land use/transport model.
-The USE-IT decision support tool.
-The GIS based RASTER method -the MEPLUS post-processing tool.
The system can be used for urban policy formulation and testing as well as testing for individual measures (investment, regulatory, pricing). The system is being enhanced as part of the PROPOLIS research project (V Framework Research Programme) and is being extended as well to Vicenza Province.
The results are described in detail in the SPARTACUS final report (http://www.ltcon.fi/spartacus ). The effects of policy options are presented as indicator and background variable values and indices for the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability.
Information about the further enhancement of the methodology can be found in http://www.ltcon.fi/propolis.
Naples:
The Meplan integrated land-use and transport model was implemented to support the Master Transport Plan of Naples in 1996, whose objectives were strongly orientated toward a better use of the existing public transport infrastructure. The operability of the model was later enriched by the participation in the SPARTACUS and PROPOLiS projects funded by FP4 and FP5 and by local authorities. Later in 1998, the model was selected by DGVII to test on the impact on land use and transport of different policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions in urban areas. The wide range of applications of the model has confirmed its robustness as well as its flexibility, allowing to explicitly measure the impact of the adoption of different policies and investments on various factors, such the location of households and economic activities, the level of accessibility of zones and the volume and distribution of traffic flows.
Vicenza:
The integrated land use-transport model was applied for the Master Traffic Plan of the city and refers to the whole province for a total of 27 land use zones and 115 transport zones. The model represents the location of 3 household types (i.e. managerial and professional, non-manual and manual), 8 types of economic activities (i.e. agriculture, industry, construction, trade, primary and secondary school education, public administration, public and private services) and 4 types land/floor space (agricultural, industrial, business-shopping and residential). The interaction between all these factors is represented by variable input-output coefficients. The transport model simulates the effects of detailed transport design on the urban road network and also deals with local parking supply. It is able to reproduce demand reaction to regulatory/pricing policies and provision of park and ride facilities for minibuses in the central area.