Strategic choices impact on urban mobility improvement: A Case study of Tehran

Abstract

Concerning the upcoming issues in attaining urban mobility improvement, this research investigates the impact of changes in strategic policies to improve urban mobility. Accordingly, a novel policy approach and its evaluation methodology are proposed, and Tehran's urban mobility and outcomes are appraised in a real-large scale case study. Founded on the outlined approach, strategic policies and policy options are suggested through stakeholders' participation. This paper presents a methodology for assessing the amelioration of urban mobility through the change of policy approach as a conceptual framework in five steps. In line with this, a model-based tool is applied to quantify policy options according to the proposed criteria. To accumulate the required data on the mobility behavior of city inhabitants, a household travel survey is conducted. Based on the presented assessing framework and the process of identifying alternatives and utilizing the macroscopic transportation models, the best alternative is chosen using a Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) method. This research shows that making changes in the policy approach can take the lead overriding role in improving urban mobility. As such, the study finds that development-nature alternatives alone cannot significantly boost urban mobility in developing cities if they do not combine improvements in public transport and soft modes of mobility with restrictions on the use of private cars. The proposed approach and opted alternative are shown to mitigate total travel time in Tehran Central Business District (CBD) by 6.8 per cent.

Keywords

• urban mobility improvement
• strategic policies
• policy options
• modelling
• stakeholders' participation