A new method to recover the correct land use and public transport interaction

Abstract

In the last years the increasing use of private vehicles in urban areas creates negative impacts on the society particularly for the congestion, implying an increase of travel times, of air and noise pollution, of accidents, and the excessive production of greenhouse gases and land consumption. Public transport could represent a more efficient mode of travel with respect to the car, playing an important role to provide a more sustainable transport system. However, infrastructural actions operated on the public transport system are usually of long term, with respect to actions operated on land use, thus creating a considerable temporal gap between the land use and the transport system development. Starting from these remarks, the present study proposes a new method to overcome this temporal discrepancy, using the residual capacity of the mass transit system (existing or its short term development) as a variable to indicate the location and the magnitude of new residential and activities developments. The method has been applied to the city of Rome (Italy), suggesting how the Local Authority could guide the development of the urban area in a sustainable way for the next years.