City Science

Overview

In collaboration with Wood PLC, City Science contributed to the development of a Sustainable Transport Strategy for the City of York Council Local Plan. The strategy focused on promoting active travel and bus usage for a planned housing development in the city’s rural surrounds. Our role focused on providing the active travel and bus evidence base and interventions, to support the city in achieving its carbon, growth, and sustainability targets.

Scope

This commission was to support the City of York Council with planning for a new garden village, a 1000 home development outside and to the south east of the city’s urbanised area. The council was keen to promote bus and active travel options for the development, owing to their:

Target of being carbon neutral (including transport-related emissions) by 2030
Ambition to promote sustainable and healthy lifestyles
Prediction of negative impacts upon an already crowded local road network if there is a dependency upon cars

City Science Response

Evidence Base

We conducted high-quality analysis and produced detailed and interactive maps to baseline land use, mode share, travel patterns, existing travel infrastructure and services, and current travel times. These were considered in the context of proposed site of the housing development, and key surrounding locations. To achieve this, we leveraged our in-house innovative computational tools:

LCWIP Toolkit: A toolkit of automated processes which allows us to quickly analyse active travel infrastructure
Cadence: Our award-winning transport planning software which we used to determine current travel times by different mode, and produce high-quality mapping (click here to find out more)

The use of these tools allowed us to gain more insight from the data since it increases our efficiency in data processing, thus leaving more time for interpretation.

Active Travel & Bus Planning

Based on this baseline and understanding of desired movement, we then developed evidenced bus planning and active travel interventions to inform the Sustainable Transport Strategy and support the development. To inform our bus service planning, we:

Reviewed historical bus service plans and proposals
Assessed existing journey times and reliability constraints
Collated infrastructure information (e.g. bus lane operating hours)
Identified duplicate service offerings
Identified services with operating capacity for extension or diversion

From this information we were able to propose five potential options to service the new site, whilst also enhancing the overall bus offer, including combinations of:

Bus Rapid Transit and/or bus lanes
Express orbital services, between park & rides
Service extensions and/or rerouting
Increasing infrequent service frequencies
Demand Responsive Bus Services

Outcomes