Quantifying and Mapping the Distributed Impacts of Regionally Integrated Transport Strategies

: (Alternative Format Thesis)

Abstract

In 2022, passenger transport contributed 29% of all EU emissions, with road transport making up 70% and if current policies and practices remain, large rises in transport emissions are anticipated. The vital role of passenger transport in multiple environmental and socioeconomic spheres highlights the need to counterbalance the expected increase in demand and resulting adverse consequences with transport strategies focused on (1) active and shared transport, (2) innovative mobility services promoting transport integration and access, and (3) alternative vehicle propulsion technologies.

Multiple transport strategies and policies are being developed and implemented at international, national, regional and local levels. These initiatives require a strong geographic interconnection and, therefore, demand collaboration and cooperation among stakeholders to ensure they align with the specific geographic and socioeconomic contexts. Transport strategies are frequently developed within international and national frameworks, resulting in local authorities being tasked with adapting these into actionable policy measures that are most suitable for their population-dense areas. This leaves a gap for residents in suburban and rural areas, who have limited alternatives to privately owned vehicles, underlining the need for developing regionally integrated transport strategies that will play an intermediary role between national objectives and local transport policies, while also guaranteeing access to shared and active transport across both urban and rural areas. Given the multiple dimensions influenced by passenger transport, it is essential to involve relevant stakeholders by clearly disseminating the objectives and impacts of planned regional transport strategies.

Additionally, it is also important to adopt interdisciplinary approaches to accurately model and assess these impacts. In this regard, a gap remains concerning the lack of replicable, integrated and flexible methodologies focused on modelling the impacts of regional transport strategies, while ensuring the outputs are easily assessed, disseminated and compatible with transport stakeholders’ priorities. This research fills this gap by developing iTRIPP, a GIS-supported location-independent methodology to inform mobility stakeholders on the potential impacts of regionally integrated transport strategies and their urban-rural distribution.

The initial step in the research involved identifying the relevant mobility stakeholders and gathering their priorities for improvements to the transport system. A systematic literature review helped characterise a stakeholder-informed transport system based on accessibility and multimodal integration. This characterisation conceptually supported the next stage for developing a comprehensive GIS-based model to quantify and map the environmental, health and economic impacts of future regional transport interventions. The final phase of the research further demonstrates the applicability of iTRIPP in quantifying and mapping the impacts of an integrated multimodal mobility service (MaaS) in urban and regional contexts. Overall, although a few urban-rural disparities were identified, a regional MaaS implementation would be regionally advantageous, yielding substantial benefits in the environmental, health and economic dimensions of the transport sector, when compared to urban-only implementations.

In summary, the output from this PhD project offers a valuable contribution to the transportation research and policymaking fields by providing a location-independent methodology and computational model that consider the geographical complexity of the transport system and determine its distributed environmental and socioeconomic impacts across a region. iTRIPP is a replicable, flexible, representative and scalable methodology contributing to the automated simulation of multiple different regional transport strategies. Moreover, by providing the outputs in numerical and mapped formats, this model will facilitate the analysis and dissemination of the results and, therefore, assist with decisionmaking and public consultation processes on proposed transport strategies.

Date of Award	10 Sept 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Andrew Heath (Supervisor) & Nick McCullen (Supervisor)