Planning and managing rural recreational traffic flows: why the future can’t be more like the past

The increasing popularity of rural tourism can cause traffic related problems at certain areas. Traffic congestion and parking problems are likely to occur as the infrastructure at these countryside destinations is seldom capable of dealing with the growing number of cars. Values which make the sites attractive to visitors can become under pressure and car traffic can also have negative effects on natural values. To prevent for such impacts, recreational traffic management is required. Recreational traffic management focuses on a smart organisation of recreational traffic flows. It has developed since the 1970s and to-day its character is influencing. Influencing takes place by offering tempting alternative opportunities and packages with varied facilities, based on specific desires of individual recreants. This requires detailed data on recreational use as well as an actor analysis, both on a regional and local scale

Evolutionary urban transportation planning? An exploration

For urban transportation planners these are challenging times. Mounting practical concerns are mirrored by more fundamental critiques. The latter come together in the observation that conventional approaches do not adequately account for the irreducible uncertainty of future developments. The central aim of this paper is to explore if and how an evolutionary approach can help overcome this limit. Two core-hypotheses are formulated. The first is that the urban transportation system behaves in an evolutionary fashion. The second hypothesis is that because of this, urban transportation planning needs also to focus on enhancing the resilience and adaptability of the system. Changes in transport and land use development patterns and policies and in the broader context in the post-war period in the Amsterdam region are analysed in order to illustrate the two core-hypotheses. In the conclusions more general implications are drawn.evolutionary economics, urban economics, transportation planning

Multiplex networks in metropolitan areas: generic features and local effects

Most large cities are spanned by more than one transportation system. These different modes of transport have usually been studied separately: it is however important to understand the impact on urban systems of the coupling between them and we report in this paper an empirical analysis of the coupling between the street network and the subway for the two large metropolitan areas of London and New York. We observe a similar behaviour for network quantities related to quickest paths suggesting the existence of generic mechanisms operating beyond the local peculiarities of the specific cities studied. An analysis of the betweenness centrality distribution shows that the introduction of underground networks operate as a decentralising force creating congestions in places located at the end of underground lines. Also, we find that increasing the speed of subways is not always beneficial and may lead to unwanted uneven spatial distributions of accessibility. In fact, for London -- but not for New York -- there is an optimal subway speed in terms of global congestion. These results show that it is crucial to consider the full, multimodal, multi-layer network aspects of transportation systems in order to understand the behaviour of cities and to avoid possible negative side-effects of urban planning decisions.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. Final version with an additional discussion on the total congestio

Contextual influences on social enterprise management in rural and urban communities

The idea that difference exists between rural and urban enterprise activity is not new, the obvious comparators are measures such as social architecture, resource availability and accessibility. However, when the concept and practice of management in social enterprise is compared in these two contexts then there is opportunity to further our understanding of the contextual challenges encountered by social enterprise. In this paper six cases studies are compared and analysed: three cases are urban social enterprises and three classified as remote rural social enterprises. The urban cases are social enterprises located around Glasgow in the west of Scotland and are compared with three remote rural location studies, one on the Scottish mainland peninsula, the other in northern Scotland and the final case on a Scottish western island. We conclude that the main differences between remote rural and urban management of social enterprise are heavily nuanced by in-migration levels in both rural and urban locations, leadership and community needs and therefore deserving of context relevant policy

Dynamic analysis of holiday travel behaviour with integrated multimodal travel information usage: A life-oriented approach

The Integrated Multimodal Travel Information (IMTI) plays an important role in the evolution process of holiday travel behaviour, which is seldom investigated. To fill this gap, this study analyses holiday travel behaviour dynamics with IMTI usage, based on the life-oriented approach. IMTI usage is taken as a separate life domain in this study, and a two-way relationship between holiday travel biography and IMTI usage biography over the life course, is examined after controlling for the effects of residential, household structure, employment/education, and car ownership biographies. Based on the web-based life history survey data, statistical characteristics of mobilities in each life biography are first analysed. Then, different random-effects ordered logistic models are established to investigate the biographical interdependencies from three aspects: intra-domain interdependency, inter-domain interdependency and outer-domain interdependency. The results show that the life biography is not only affected by a personal life course, but also affected by external background of the times. Under the interaction of inner individual factors and outer environment factors, there is an obvious dynamic two-way relationship between holiday travel biography and IMTI usage biography. Meanwhile, residential, household structure, employment/education and car ownership biographies have significant effects on these two life biographies. Especially, the influence of long-term state dependence for different life domains, over the life course, is much more obvious when explaining holiday travel behaviour dynamics and IMTI usage mobilities. Therefore, the life-oriented approach provides a valid method for analysing the dynamics of holiday travel behaviour with IMTI usage

Learning to design for social sustainability through the synthesis of two approaches

This paper brings together research that I was involved in the SUE –MOT (sustainable urban environments; metrics models and toolkits) funded by the EPSRC (completed in 2010) and my work in Sri Lanka on a pioneering project to relocate Canal Bank dwellers that was awarded to me as winner of an open competition conducted by the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects. The project was completed in 1998. This paper compares the two approaches; Top down and Bottom up approaches to learn to design better for social sustainability

Explaining the variety in smart eco city development in China-What policy network theory can teach us about overcoming barriers in implementation?

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is one of the largest and fastest growing urbanized deltas in China and the world. Its municipalities hope to attract investors, firms, high-quality labour force and residents in line with ecological modernization. They do so by using a variety of attractive city labels, such as eco city, low carbon city, and smart city. The physical shape th

Modelling intra-regional geographic mobility in a rural setting

Large-scale models are often used in the urban planning context to model the effects of, for instance, a change in land-use policies or transportation infrastructure. This class of models accounts for factors such as the spatial distribution of jobs and workers, commuting flows, housing markets, modal choice and so on. One criticism of such models is their complexity, computational demands and data requirements. In this paper, we develop a model which shares certain features with large-scale models, but which is appropriate for studying development at the intra-regional level in a rural setting. The rural setting means that not all of the traditional features of a large-scale model are relevant, and these can therefore be omitted. This allows us to create a simple model which still captures the most relevant effects of large-scale models.