TRANSPORT DEMAND MANAGEMENT IN HISTORIC CITIES

This paper reports on a research project which was designed to investigate the effectiveness of a range of demand management strategies applied to three case study historic cities: Cambridge, Norwich and York. The three cities are all members of the Historic Towns Forum. The cities have different levels of car ownership, congestion and economic performance and the results of the study are expected to be broadly transferable to other towns and cities of similar size and within the same range of economic circumstances. The four strategies considered were parking control, physical control, permits and road pricing. While some have been extensively researched, others have not, and there is still uncertainty on their relative ability to change travel patterns and improve the environment. Possibly the most serious barriers to implementation are their potentially adverse impacts on the local economy and the adverse public attitudes to them, both of which were investigated in this project. The specific objectives of the project were to assess the effectiveness of such strateiges through: predicting the travel responses to, and the traffic and environmental impacts of the four methods; assessing the perceived and predicted effects on the urban economy of these travel, traffic and environmental impacts; investigating public attitudes to the four methods and to their predicted effects. The outcome of the project was intended to be guidance on the potential for application of the four methods, their future development and implementation of the enabling technologies. The project was undertaken as a sequential series of performance assessments of the different demand management strategies according to the following criteria: determination of travel choices in the areas through use of stated preference techniques; an assessment of traffic effects using the SATURN model and the SATEASY elastic assignment routine; an assessment of the environmental effects, again using SATURN, but with enhancements to the existing algorithms for determining environmental impact using TEMMS; an assessment of the impacts of different demand management strategies on the urban economies of the cities, in particular looking at the attitudes of the business community; an assessment of public attitudes towards the different strategies; review and consultation with the local authorities involved, DETR and the Local Government Association. (A) For the covering abstract see ITRD E107063.