Flexible Planning for Intercity Multimodal Transport Infrastructure

Abstract

Planning transport infrastructure development involves high levels of uncertainty due to socioeconomic, environmental, and technological changes. Methodologies currently used in transport planning often have minimal consideration for adaptiveness, leading to costly redesigns or cancellation of entire projects. Presented herein is the investigation of the applicability of dynamic adaptive policy pathways, which is a methodology predominantly used in the field of flood-risk planning, to long-term transport infrastructure planning. Specifically, the paper investigates whether this methodology could facilitate ongoing adaptation to variations in service demand and capacity. It demonstrates this by examining future demand and capacity of road and rail travel between Manchester, United Kingdom, and London using publicly available data and information sources. The study shows that dynamic adaptive policy pathways is useful for identifying periods of time of significant capacity vulnerability for the examined transport network in the coming decade. The method is demonstrated to be valuable for identifying the points in time when policy-makers will have to make decisions and for assessing the impact of transport mode switching. This can have implications of cost-saving and improved service delivery.