Allocation of Shared Space
The demands and requirements on road space design, but also the space requirements of the individual means of transport are currently undergoing a significant change. After many years of focusing on motor vehicle traffic, there is an increasing demand for a new distribution of street space. All road users should be considered equally in the planning processes, but especially in the distribution of road space. Cycling and pedestrian traffic in particular demand fairness of space. A new arrangement and design of streets, curbsite and places is required.
New services and mobility offers such as delivery services, pooled on-demand transport, electric scooters, but also the increasing proportion of cyclists require a redesign of public space. Due to climate change and climate protection, greening and shading at the roadside are also playing an increasingly important role. Trees and shrubs improve the micro climate, increase the quality of stay and the attractiveness of the public space. These different requirements compete for existing space.
In our research projects, we deal with the following questions: What kind of traffic space allocation makes sense? How do traffic flows change as a result of a modified spatial distribution? What are the consequences of redesigning the road space on traffic demand?
Our fields of action
- Simulation and evaluation of road space design and road space use
- Studies on demand developments, traffic volumes and capacities
- Development of traffic forecasts and scenarios
- Creation of intermodal mobility concepts
- Simulation of the interaction of road users
Our product portfolio supports you on this and many other topics.
Selected projects
A simulation of the planned redesign variants and the evaluation of their effects is helpful for the design of road space and the redistribution of road space. For this reason, the research department participated in the EU-funded MORE project - Multimodal Optimisation of Road Space in Europe. The aim of this project was to develop a procedure for the design of urban TEN-T corridors and to implement it in the cities of Budapest, Constanța, Lisbon, London and Malmö. PTV was able to use its simulation software PTV Vissim to model a realistic representation of activities in the road space, interactions between different road users and dynamic solutions for road space design and to evaluate implementation measures.
Furthermore, in Flow - Furthering Less Congestion by Creating Opportunities for more Walking and Cycling, also an EU project, we have extended our macroscopic and microscopic transport planning software Visum and Vissim to better analyse the impact of measures to promote cycling and walking on congestion. An evaluation procedure for estimating the overall economic consequences of measures for pedestrians and cyclists, taking multi-modal aspects into account, was developed.
The projects CoExist and ACCorD used our simulation software to investigate the lateral and longitudinal routing of autonomously driving vehicles and thus also allowed an assessment of the dimensions of the traffic space and the capacities for which the future infrastructure must be designed. In the TEMPUS project, interactions between the various road users are analysed. Findings flow into the further development of our software.
