The Windscreen World of Land Use Transport Integration: Experiences from Perth, a Dispersed City

'Land use transport integration' has been part of planning ideology for decades. Today it is seen as a means of achieving sustainable travel outcomes. Despite the clear intentions of early planning policy, its selective implementation resulted in a low-density, dispersed city. Now the ability to reduce motorised travel and car kilometres is a major challenge given the spread of land use and scatter of activity across a very large metropolitan area. The 'love affair with the car' has seen a struggle for focus on access for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport. But the more recent experience in the context of this dispersed city is promising, urban development is achieving some of the physical characteristics of land use transport integration with greatest progress made in recent years. At the neighbourhood scale there are small 'islands' of development change with a strong focus on achieving accessibility, proximity and creation of shared streets. At the metro/regional scale the focus is on extending the rail network, but city planning is still driven by 'car-centric' principles the windscreen view of the world. Designing a transport system to compete with the car, rather than tailoring the demand for mobility by designing a different spatial land use pattern perpetuates hypermobility and automobility

Institutional practices and planning for walking: A focus on built environment audits

Built environment audits, part of the “toolbox” for planning multi-modal urban transport systems, are used to evaluate the walkability of streets. Whereas the methodological features of audits have attracted attention from planning research, little attention has been paid to the institutional contexts where audits are developed and used. Drawing on literature on audit culture in contemporary institutions and on expert interviews with audit developers and professionals in Australia and New Zealand working with walking audits, three questions are addressed: Who uses walkability audits? How are they used? What substantive changes emerge from auditing practice? The knowledge of practice of auditing the built environment for walking is underdeveloped. While planners, engineers and advocates consider built environment audits useful in different ways, of concern is the use of audits to rationalise limited resources already devoted to infrastructure for walking, rather than produce substantive changes to the quality of the built environment for walking

Can Network City deliver a sustainable future?

'Network City', the new regional planning strategy for metropolitan Perth, Western Australia, was finalized in 2004. It sets the framework for urban development for a 25 year period to 2029. Its preparation has provided the impetus for a new debate on urban form and sustainability. That debate, and also the production of the strategy, has taken shape through a new collaborative planning process which required a significant change in the practice of planning as genuine attempts were made to engage the wider community.This paper reports on the new planning approaches established during the development of the new regional planning strategy. It describes the procedural changes to plan production aimed at creating a community planning strategy. The new spatial framework is outlined and the way in which it is envisaged that more sustainable city outcomes can be achieved through changes to planning practice

Designing TOD precincts: accessibility and travel patterns

This paper reports on a research study that investigated the travel behaviour of residents in three case study station precincts located along a new railway in Perth, Western Australia. The precincts were selected for comparison, representing the different development opportunities ranging from planned transit-oriented development (TOD) to station precincts acting primarily as origin stations or transit interchanges. Accessibility measures and the actual travel patterns of residents in each station precinct were compared, in order to consider the degree to which different station precinct designs have led residents to reduce their motorised travel and to substitute it with both public transport within the region, and walking or cycling within the local neighbourhood. We draw on two surveys: a household survey, including a travel diary, examining behaviours after the railway opened; a detailed survey measuring both local and regional accessibility using a suite of over 30 measures of multi-modal accessibility. The results highlight the dual role of public transport and land—use planning in changing mobility patterns, using a temporal perspective. We found a positive relationship between improvements to accessibility by public transport and residents reducing car-based travel. Residents also increased the spatial reach of their travel and many converted from uni-modal to multi-modal travellers. At the local level (station precinct), however, we found an accessibility mismatch between infrastructure and proximity to facilities, whereby neighbourhoods with a high standard of infrastructure for walking and cycling do not have corresponding facilities that they may walk or cycle to and vice versa

Performance Measures for Public Transport Accessibility: learning from international practice

There is a growing recognition by city policymakers that urban public transport systems can be developed in such a way that travelers can be offered an alternative to car-based travel. How to evolve the public transport system for this purpose is a significant challenge and raises questions of accessibility and quality largely absent from current planning evaluation. This paper explores the use of accessibility performance measures, both to assess the extent of current public transport accessibility and as a potential metric for future planning and investment. The Spatial Network Analysis for Multimodal Urban Transport Systems (SNAMUTS) tool is employed for analysis of accessibility. A sample of 21 international cities is assessed, representing a range of transport and land-use policy contexts from best to ordinary practice, including those held up as exemplars in public transport infrastructure, service planning, and delivery in Europe and North America. The findings show that the incidence of successful metropolitan public transport systems, as measured by patronage, can be linked to accessibility performance measures of network and service configurations

Decision support tools in city planning: bridging the gap between numerologists and conversationalists

Decisions taken on transport infrastructure and urban form often rely upon conventional urban models and their interface with Cost-Benefit Analysis. Such positivist methods typically conceal the full complexity and uncertainty of how large projects can transform cities. Recent years have seen the emergence of new, more participatory planning Decision Support Tools (DST), designed to guide broader discussion and facilitate more open and inclusive dialogue between planners and communities. However, the effectiveness of such tools, in informing different political discussions and in ultimately influencing policy outcomes remains poorly understood. This is particularly as participant attention often reverts to system outputs at the expense of discussions of broader goals or strategies. DSTs may also lack ready interoperability with formal project evaluation processes (such as the Infrastructure Australia Assessment Framework), limiting their usefulness in translating future visions into project definition. Drawing on experiences from research and professional practice, in Australia and internationally, we consider the potential for traditional urban travel demand models and DST to be combined within a more complementary process of planning, evaluating, and selecting urban infrastructure projects. In doing so, we highlight the challenge of designing planning processes with flexibility and robustness to handle highly uncertain urban futures, and contemplate how the integration of knowledge between modellers, DST developers, planning agencies, and urban publics could better inform the future course of Australian cities

Spatial accessibility of public transport in Australian cities: Does it relieve or entrench social and economic inequality?

City planning in Australian cities has seen a gradual shift in approach, away from planning to facilitate mobility by car in the post-war period toward planning for land-use/public transport integration. By assessing the supply of public transport for city accessibility, a considerable variation within each city can be seen. Of interest is the extent to which there is a relationship between the quality of public transport accessibility and the spatial distribution of socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage. This paper examines this issue by mapping spatial data on socioeconomic disadvantage and advantage against indicators of public transport accessibility. The findings show that Australian cities are characterized by a significant level of spatially manifested socioeconomic inequality exacerbated by transport disadvantage. It is argued that a coincidence of public transport infrastructure and service improvements as well as urban intensification and housing affordability policies are required to counteract these trends

An Analysis of the Lightning Jump Algorithm Using Geostationary Lightning Mapper Flashes

This project aims to implement the two-sigma lightning jump algorithm (LJA) developed using Lightning Mapping Arrays (LMAs), with GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) flashes, evaluate its performance, and identify any needed adjustments to the algorithm to optimize operational skill. The GLM is projected to have lower detection efficiency (DE) (70-90 percent) than operational LMAs (95-99 percent). The reduced GLM DE coupled with the coarser spatial resolution of the GLM could have impacts on flash rates and trends that could affect the LJA in various ways. Deep dives are conducted on four separate cases. Three of four cases show LMAs seeing two to three times as many flashes as the GLM. Only fifteen of twenty five GLM jumps saw increases in radar intensity while fourteen of nineteen LMA jumps did. These results suggest a larger sample sized study must be conducted to determine how to implement the LJA with the GLM

An Analysis of the Lightning Jump Algorithm Using Geostationary Lightning Mapper Flashes

Lightning's relation to severe weather has been studied since the 1980's. The invention of the Lightning Mapping Array allowed for total lightning measurements in a 125 km operational range. This brought forth an automated lightning Jump Algorithm (LIA) that predicted severe weather based on two-sigma increases in total lightning. The LIA's biggest downfall is being restrained to the limited field of view (FOV) of LMA's. The launch of the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) aboard the GOES-16 satellite now gives us hemispheric total lightning measurements. The wide FOV makes the GLM a good candidate to apply the LIA to. However the GLM and LMA have some differences. One being the coarser spatial resolution of GLM. Another being that LMA measures very high frequency (VHF) electromagnetic radiation while GLM measures optical radiation. These differences suggest an extensive study must be done on using the LIA with GLM to understand potential differences in the LIA and to maximize its operational skill. Four deep dive cases are conducted showcasing the differences between the GLM and LMA and their jumps

The general caloron correspondence

We outline in detail the general caloron correspondence for the group of automorphisms of an arbitrary principal $G$-bundle $Q$ over a manifold $X$, including the case of the gauge group of $Q$. These results are used to define characteristic classes of gauge group bundles. Explicit but complicated differential form representatives are computed in terms of a connection and Higgs field.Comment: 25 pages. New section added containing example