OPTIMA - Final Summary Report

Optimisation of Policies for Transport Integration

in Metropolitan Areas

1. PARTNERSHIP

• The Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) (Coordinating Partner) University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, England
• The Institute of Traffic Planning and Traffic Engineering (TUW-IVV) (Full Partner)

• The Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) (Full Partner)

• The Centre for the Study of Transport Systems (CSST) (Full Partner)

• Azienda Tranvie Municipale - Torino (TT-ATM) (Associate Partner)

• The Institute of Transport Economics (TØI) (Full Partner)

PO Box 6100 Etterstad, Grensesvingen 7, Oslo, N-0602, Norway

1. OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT

The overall objectives of Project OPTIMA were:

 

(i) to identify optimal urban transport and land use strategies for a range of urban areas within the EU;

(ii) to compare the strategies which are specified as optimal in different cities, and to assess the reasons for these differences;

(iii) to assess the acceptability and feasibility of implementation of these strategies both in nine case study cities (Edinburgh, Merseyside, Vienna, Eisenstadt, Tromsø, Oslo, Helsinki, Torino and Salerno) and more widely in the EU; and

(iv) to use the results to provide more general guidance on urban transport policy within the EU.

 

 

1. TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION

These objectives were achieved by carrying out the following tasks:

 

1. specify two objective functions, one each for economic efficiency and sustainability, which are acceptable to, and can be applied in, all the cities being studied;

2. identify, separately for each city, an acceptable set of transport and land use policy instruments, and to extend this list to cover measures in use elsewhere in the EU;

3. conduct a series of tests of combinations of policy measures, in each city, using currently available transport models of these cities;

4. use the optimisation methodology, separately for each city, to identify strategies which are optimal in terms of economic efficiency and sustainability in each city.

5. draw policy conclusions for each city on the differences between the efficiency-optimal and sustainability -optimal strategies, the justification for those strategies, and the feasibility of implementation, in discussion with the city authorities;

6. draw project-wide conclusions by comparing the results for the different cities, explaining the differences between them, and discussing their applicability in other EU member states.

 

These were achieved in Work Packages 10 to 60 respectively, extensive details of which are given in the respective Work Package Reports (OPTIMA, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, and 1997d) which are available on the ITS web page at:

 

http://www.its.leeds.ac.uk/projects/optima/

 

Definition of objective functions (Task 1)

 

The Economic Efficiency Function (EEF) reflects the cities’ objectives of overall efficiency of the transport system, economising the use of resources, accessibility within the city and at least the possibility of economic regeneration. Essentially, the EEF performs a cost benefit analysis of the tested policy, while also imposing a shadow price on the financial support required.

 

The Sustainability Objective Function (SOF) differs from the EEF in that the exhaustible resource of fossil fuel is valued more highly than its market price, and that a penalty is incurred for those policies that do not meet a certain minimum requirement on fossil fuel savings. These features of the SOF reflect the aim to reduce CO₂ emissions. Also, costs and benefits are only considered for the horizon year, representing the interests of future generations.

 

Common set of measures

 

Based upon an inventory of measures carried out by the project (Task 2), a set of common measures was selected for use in the optimisation process. Table 1 shows these measures and the maximum ranges considered (some cities used narrower ranges where it was felt that the maximum range was simply infeasible).

 

Abbreviation	Name	Minimum Value	Maximum Value
IH	High public transport infrastructure investment	0	1 (dummy)
IM	Medium public transport infrastructure investment	0	1 (dummy)
CAP	Low cost increase/decrease of road capacity (whole city)*	-20%	+20%
FREQ	Increasing/decreasing public transport frequency (whole city)	-50%	+100%
RP	Road pricing # (city centre)	0	10.0 ecus
PCH	Increasing/decreasing parking charges (city centre)	-100%	+500%
FARE	Increasing/decreasing public transport fares (whole city)	-100%	+100%

Table 1: Measures tested

* Road capacity measures include various types of traffic management and transport telematics, but do not include road building

# The value of the measure Road Pricing refers to the cost per trip incurred by the car driver

Optimisation process

 

Once measures and their ranges were defined, transport model runs were carried out (Task 3) to test an initial set of combinations of transport measures (packages). The number of packages in this set was the minimum number required to start up the optimisation process. The optimisation process (Task 4) was then applied to find the optimum set of values of these measures for each city, separately for each objective function.

 

Consultation process

 

Based on the initial review of the results, consultations were held with officials in each of the nine cities (Task 5). They were presented with the results, and invited to assess them against a set of criteria which focused on issues of feasibility and acceptability. Inevitably there was some overlap between the concerns under these two headings. The officials were also invited to suggest alternative strategies which they would wish to have tested. When these alternatives were tested, none of them performed better than the predicted optima (with respect to the objective functions), and the opportunity was taken to discuss these results. The output of these consultations was discussed with two other cities to test transferability, and then used to develop the conclusions specified below (Task 6).

 

 

2. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

Policy results and recommendations

The results from the optimisation process are summarised in Table 2, which gives an overview of the relative benefit (over the nine case study cities) of each measure with respect to the two objective functions used.

Table 2 : Summary of beneficial measures

From the results in Table 2 and from other aspects of the research, the following recommendations can be made for policy makers

• strategies should be based on combinations of measures, and should draw fully on the synergy between success measures;
• economically efficient measures can be expected to include low cost improvements to road capacity, improvements in public transport (increased service levels or reductions in fares), and increases in the cost of car use;
• public transport infrastructure investment is not likely, in the majority of cases, to be a key element in economically efficient strategies;
• reductions in capacity to discourage car use are not likely to be economically efficient;
• the scale of changes in service levels and fares will be influenced by the current level of subsidy; in some cases a reduction in service levels or an increase in fares may be justified on economic grounds;
• the scale of increase in costs of car use will depend in part on current levels of congestion; the study suggests that road pricing and parking charge increases are broadly interchangeable, but this needs assessing in more detail;
• in most cases economically efficient strategies can be designed which are financially feasible, provided that revenues can be used to finance other strategy elements;
• the pursuit of sustainability is likely to justify investment in public transport infrastructure, further improvements to public transport services and/or fares, and further increases in the cost of car use;
• availability of finance will be a major barrier to implementation of many sustainability-optimal strategies, and further work is needed to investigate the extent to which financial costs can be reduced by strategies which are slightly sub-optimal;
• legislation will be needed to enable implementation of road pricing and to control parking charges; in the UK and Italy there is also a case for changing legislation to permit economically more efficient public transport strategies;
• public acceptability will be a significant barrier with those measures which reduce service levels or increase costs; this implies the need for effective public relations campaigns, and carefully designed implementation programmes;
• detailed measures to improve the environment and provide better facilities for cyclists, pedestrians and disabled people should be designed within the context of a preferred strategy.