Delivering Tram-Based Boulevards: Learning from Opportunities and Challenges in Three European City Case Studies

Increasing calls for zero-carbon cities invite transformative solutions for people and places within our cities around the world. Key to the transformation is cities and regions shifting in mobility away from fossil-fuel based car-oriented solutions. The paper investigates a range of case studies where “tram-based boulevards” have been planned or implemented to provide such opportunities. The case studies share a common broader policy objective: to transform the car-oriented or car-saturated areas to an intensified urban template based on a critical presence of dedicated mid-tier transit infrastructure and active transport. “Trams”, or mid-tier, mid-capacity transit when combined with Transit oriented development (TOD) along whole corridors can provide transformative pathways towards zero-carbon outcomes as well as multiple, strong urban benefits. However, many successful or instructive examples of this practice from non-English speaking countries, particularly in Europe, are underdocumented in the international literature. The paper addresses this gap by investigating opportunities and challenges evident in a range of European case studies. These are explored for insight towards policy learning particularly in New World cities seeking to transform into a zero-carbon and more transit-oriented template: How can decision-makers avoid repeating the identified pitfalls, and instead focus on emulating the successful approaches and outcomes? We conclude the need for recognition of the inherent synergies between transport and land use settings in any endeavour, and their translation into policy priorities in both fields of planning. We also conclude the importance of decision makers proactively identifying and critically appraising specific opportunities for change, concerning funding, technology, public opinion, stakeholder alliances or market dynamics, and capitalising on them at suitable moments in time.

Unravel the spatio-temporal patterns and their nonlinear relationship with correlates of dockless shared bikes near metro stations

The dockless bike-sharing system has rapidly expanded worldwide and has been widely used as an intermodal transport to connect with public transportation.However,higher flexibility may cause an imbalance between supply and demand during daily operation,especially around the metro stations.A stable and efficient rebalancing model requires spatio-temporal usage patterns as fundamental inputs.Therefore,understanding the spatio-temporal patterns and correlates is important for optimizing and rescheduling bike-sharing systems.This study proposed a dynamic time warping distance-based two-dimensional clustering method to quantify spatio-temporal patterns of dockless shared bikes in Wuhan and further applied the multiclass explainable boosting machine to explore the main related factors of these patterns.The results found six patterns on weekdays and four patterns on weekends.Three patterns show the imbalance of arrival and departure flow in the morning and evening peak hours,while these phenomena become less intensive on weekends.Road density,living service facility density and residential density are the top influencing factors on both weekdays and weekends,which means that the comprehensive impact of built-up environment attraction,facility suitability and riding demand leads to the different usage patterns.The nonlinear influence universally exists,and the probability of a certain pattern varies in different value ranges of variables.When the densities of living facilities and roads are moderate and the relationship between job and housing is relatively balanced,it can effectively promote the balanced usage of dockless shared bikes while maintaining high riding flow.The spatio-temporal patterns can identify the associated problems such as imbalance or lack of users,which could be mitigated by corresponding solutions.The relative importance and nonlinear effects help planners prioritize strategies and identify effective ranges on different patterns to promote the usage and efficiency of the bike-sharing system.