Examination of the effects of new transportation technologies and business models on urban structure

Abstract

We live in a new era in transportation with advancements in technology changing people’s lives in multiple ways. The problem researched in this project is the effect that these advancements could cause to land use. The first element here, as in any research, is to identify the research gap and formulate the aim and the objectives of the project. Subsequently, the thesis is separated into three main parts, namely the literature review, the methodology developed to address the research gap and scenario modelling to evaluate predictions of the effects. Following a detailed literature review of relevant topics was conducted and it was found that the land use effects of new technologies have received limited attention, which constitutes a gap in knowledge, for which this thesis aims to provide answers. Following, the principles of the methodology are described and it is also analysed how the application of these principals in the context of this thesis is feasible in order to produce valuable results. For the application of the principles, different key values such as generalised costs, car ownership costs, variables related to road capacity and trip rates were used for calibration and parts of the internal modelling structure of the selected LUTI model are changed. More specifically, a new car ownership model was calibrated and incorporated in the system. The selected case study for this analysis is the West Midlands region (UK) and as a result, test scenarios that incorporate new vehicles technologies and business models in the West Midlands region were designed. Based on the produced results, it is evident that the incorporation of new vehicle technologies and business models in the transportation system can increase total regional population and total regional employment. However, the urban areas with the highest financial power have decreasing trends in terms of population and employment and as a result a spatial redistribution of activities is evident in the test scenarios that incorporate the aforementioned transport innovations. Moreover, the zones that neighbour with the region have decreased population and employment, which indicates that due to increased accessibility from the transportation technologies and business models different form of economic activity is attracted to the region. Finally, the developed methodology and the produced results were validated by utilising a combination of the validation methods of sensitivity analysis and validations by experts.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Ioannis Kaparias: orcid.org/0000-0002-8857-1865

ORCID for John Preston: orcid.org/0000-0002-6866-049X

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