INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND TRANSPORTATION PLANNING: A NEW APPROACH
Two major developments have happened which open up the prospect of a change in the mode of transport planning. Firstly, there have been major developments within transportation design and technology aligned to the advent of new information technologies. We now live in a world of intelligent transportation systems where Global Positioning Systems (GPS)play their role in navigation and guidance of vehicles to their destinations and in which many other intelligent vehicle applications are present and can operate at both individual vehicle and traffic system levels. Secondly, we now live in a world where access to information technology is widely distributed : access can be had from the home, in the automobile and through the mobile or cellular telephone.
The capabilities of tracking vehicles en route and displaying in real time their positions to a global public provides a potential level of surveillance by the public over the public transport system which was previously impossible. The failure of vehicles to arrive on time at any particular stop was previously a situation of purely local knowledge: recording such failures systematically a competence which lay with the vehicle operator alone. A comprehensive view of such scheduling failures over whole systems was difficult to achieve as vehicle operators frequently disguised such failures from management. The spatial pattern of scheduling failures is now viewable and more importantly shareable with the consumer or end user: the public. Indeed, encouraging the use of public transport as opposed to the use of the private automobile is dependent upon the sharing of such information: real time information on bus or tram arrivals as it operates in Helsinki also represents a real time display of failures to meet schedules.
The distributed character of the new information communication technology also permits the public to monitor the performance of transport systems independently of the management of transport companies. New information technology enables the public to coordinate in assessing the quality of services it receives: the transaction costs to an individual of providing information to a community monitoring site is low and the advent of the web and the net enable easy data exchange at low cost.
Both within the United States and within Europe distributed access to information communication technologies has been associated with the growth of web coordinated social movements. It has also been associated with the growth of local civic activities: social coordination is rendered easier.
In transport planning, the web and internet have played their part in the expansion of consultation exercises and the ability to download transport planning consultation materials in the home and remain updated on planning activities without additional search costs clearly have potential in increasing civic engagement in transport planning activities. On line materials play their part in permitting citizens to diary or schedule their attendance at meetings.
An important facet of the relationship between new intelligent vehicle technologies and widely distributed access to information communication technologies is the prospect of the development of demand responsive transport provision. For those individuals, groups and communities for whom the automobile is not a transport option because of cost or disability and for whom standard mass transit provisions does not work because of disability or poor provision within their districts, demand responsive transport is increasingly becoming a probable solution. Intelligent reservations systems and intelligent route construction enables those outside of the conventional transport system to be transported from home to destination or from home to join the fast transport corridors.
Considerations of congestion and green house gases place presssure on policy makers to consider and device new transport options to the private automobile: public resistance to the constraining of private automobility will require high quality public transport solutions to be appeased. Demand responsive transport systems are likely to play an important part in this process.
Similarly, widely accessible high quality real time information on public transport performance is important in persuading the public to make journeys either wholely or in part by public transport. Developments along these lines are happening in Chicago.
Apart from the development of intelligent vehicle systems and from widely distributed access to new information communication technologies, there is a third development which is likely to have consequences for the form of future transport planning. It is the advent of metadata. Metadata will enable better planning procedures and enable greater transparency in planning procedures. Indeed the systematising of metadata at state and federal levels has already begun within the USA.
New information communication technologies can deliver more transparent planning processes and enable greater levels of public participation in the planning, monitoring and operating of public transport systems. New ICTs have the potential to greatly change the transport policy landscape: the extent to which either citizens or government make use of the new prospect of interactivity and its potential for extended participation has yet to be determined.
Practice:
Working with the understandings above, myself and colleagues from transport and from organisation studies have been working with low income communities in the North East of England who are in circumstances of transport deprivation. These communities live in a context where there are low levels of automobile ownership and very low levels of public transport provision. With these communities we have been involved in a number of community monitoring of public transport provision exercises and experiments.
The nature of global communication technologies has meant that workshops held locally have been broadcast internationally through web casts. We undertook community monitoring of public transport over a two day period in the West of Newcastle on Tyne: we did this to demonstrate the potential of the new information communication tools when linked with sizeable volunteer activities. In undertaking this action research we have had support from local authorities and indeed from transport companies.
This action research is still in progress but has already had some useful results: central government research agencies have been working directly with the transport forums developed within this research; resources have been won for transport experiments and visibility of these activities has been sustained.
Information communication technologies enable high levels of routine contacts between communities and academics and permit virtual attendance at meetings and events. The technology enables the sharing of cyberdesks and websites over distance and thus allows for e-mentoring in both directions.
At present, we are still piloting many processes, procedures and protocols in this transport action research which has the aim of bringing communities more directly into the transport planning framework.
Presentations on the work have been made at the National Science Foundation in Arlington , the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the Standing Conference on Organisation Symbolism at Budapest (Keynote presentation) and at APROS 2000 and 2001. At these presentations, community web sites are displayed and indeed it is possible to set up an electronic white board which permits the exchange of messages whilst presentations are in progress.
Professional pointers on change
The level of participation in planning that can now take place is it would seem greatly enhanced by the intersection of the distribution of information technology and the application of information technology to transport organisation and vehicle form and operation. The argument made here is that there is evidence of the take up of this new potential scattered across the transportation landscape such as new courses focusing on the importance of new information technologies in meeting public transport needs held at lead educational institutes (http://web.mit.edu/professional/summer/courses/management/CTS31s.html, however, the situation is emergent rather than fully developed.
Networked mobility
In planning terms, this short presentation draws attention to new aspects of the transport planning landscape: the first is that the interaction between transport technology and information technology permits very high levels of interaction and interactivity in the planning domain and expands the opportunity for civic participation without administrative bottlenecks. The second is that citizens can feed information into and obtain information from the transport system whilst mobile - networked mobility: real time information arrangements permit adjustments and flexibilities which were not available within old technology/planning regimes. A reflection on the implications of real time information arrangements, high levels of interactivity, the potential for open management systems and citizen ability to monitor public service performance for the development of planning protocols and regimes is timely.
Prepared by Margaret Grieco, D.Phil(Oxon), Professor of Transport and Society, Napier University, Edinburgh and Academic Visitor, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.