INTA 28 WORLD URBAN DEVELOPMENT CONGRESS KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA. 5-9 September Leong Siew Mun. Doctor. Kuala Lumpur

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1 City of Kuala Lumpur Malaysia International Association for Urban Development INTA 28 WORLD URBAN DEVELOPMENT CONGRESS KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA 5-9 September 2004 Leong Siew Mun Doctor Kuala Lumpur Strategic Transportation Planning for Sustainable Developments in Metropolitan Areas

2 Ir. Dr. Leong Siew Mun Deputy Director Urban Transportation Department City Hall Kuala Lumpur. 1.0: Introduction Metropolisation is like the adolescent stage of any teenager maturing into adulthood, is an inevitable process of urban growth. The growing business opportunities available in the urban area continuously attract an increasing rate of inwards migration. In supporting this metropolisation of the urban area, transportation system plays an utmost important role in ensuring mobility for the urbanites, providing means for people to access to services, goods be delivered to the people. It provides the back bone for the expansion of urban developments and enable continuous economic development. Though transport system plays vital role in supporting the urban development, as well as a mechanism to stimulate economic development, it must be recognized that it should also be the agent in ensuring the development to be sustainable in urban area. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the transportation system in their roles have not been proven successful with their immense negative impact on the environment, productivity and the society. Urban areas be it in developing or developed economies have unwantedly suffered the negative impact of the transportation system with high pollution level, critical congestion and worrying accident statistics. How then, could this happen? Isn t it that transportation system has been strategically planned, designed and implemented to fulfill the vision of the urban area and to achieve its objectives? Perhaps, it is a case of 'fail to plan' rather than 'plan to fail'. 2.0: The Dilemma of Conventional Transportation Planning Urban growth is a very dynamic process involving many uncertainties influenced by many uncontrollable exogenous factors and bounded by socio-political constraints. Given such dynamic environment and constraints, it is perhaps necessary to review the relevance

3 and mitigation measures in the strategic transportation planning for urban area. If we look at the similar pattern of urban transportation development in many cities of developed and developing economies, we can conclude that most of their transportation system planning follows a stereotype conventional focus and experiences the common characteristics of urban transportation problems. The conventional approach addresses the short-comings and inadequacy of existing transportation system resources from a macro perspective, attempting to achieve the long term vision of future developments. The out-come of the planning yields a long term large scale infrastructure development programmes to be implemented by phases. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of this scheduled infrastructure developments often lack behind the actual urban growth. This has resulted a situation of Yesterday s Solutions for Today s Problems. In addition, its weakest point is that this approach ignores the opportunity of exploiting the optimum utilisation of existing resources and drives us to a state of 'Built and Forget' on our infrastructure resources. This is clearly demonstrated by the process of traditional 4-step transportation planning model, namely trip generation, trip distribution, model split and trip assignment, where everything stops after implementation. Figure 1 below illustrates a typical 4-step transportation planning model. Inventory Analysis 4-Step Transport Planning Model Trip Generation, Distribution, Modal Split & Assignment

4 Any long range transportation system infrastructure development plan, must be complimented with a system management component to ensure that the eventual infrastructure implemented is efficiently managed and operated. As urban development and the process of metropolisation is getting more sophisticated with high expectation from the general public there is definitely a need to adapt our strategic planning to accommodate the urban dynamics and the expectation of the users. There must be a paradigm shift in our ways of planning, designing and implementing the transportation system. 3.0: Strategic Planning for Sustainable Urban Transportation System In order for the transportation system infrastructure to play its role effectively in urban development, the strategic planning of the infrastructure facilities must be more customer oriented and have efficient connectivity of services. Perhaps, it is important to refocus our priority to accessibility rather than mobility. Mobility, in general, refers to the ability to move between places in uncongested environment. This concept tends to drive the strategic planning for more transportation infrastructure investment, particularly advocating major road construction as a solution to urban congestion. On the other hand, accessibility

5 refers to the ability to reach the destination under the constraint of time and cost. This concept of accessibility requires the management of traffic and travel needs in a userresponsive manner. Thus, the emphasis on efficient management and operation of the transportation system resources that response to the customer needs in a changing traffic conditions should be part of the strategic transportation planning process. Besides, there is an increasing need to shift to operation focus due to the limit of the urban authority to keep on spending on capital intensive infrastructure as a way of expanding transportation system capacity. Building more urban capital facilities is extremely burdensome not only from the cost perspective but also from the political, social and environment standpoint. Effective operation and management of the existing transportation system resources becomes the most crucial alternative. With the advancement of technologies, in particular the Intelligent Transportation System, it has enabled the road infrastructure and the vehicles (both private vehicles and public transport) to be electronically linked. We can monitor the traffic flows on our road network in real time and to modify the network operations to improve the performance, thus allowing us in managing the resources more efficiently, squeezing more capacity out of the existing resources be it in the highway or public transport domain. In addition, we can create an information rich environment, providing both the users and transportation managers with a more informed view of the 'state' of the infrastructure network and thus facilitate a better decision making regarding travel needs. The success of the efficient management and operation requires an important cultural shift in mainly of our transportation institution, particularly, public sectors. For many decades, the public sectors responsible for the transportation sectors have developed the plan, design and construct culture without considering how the facilities are to be managed, operated and maintained to satisfy the changing customers needs. The shift from just

6 providing the facilities to an operation mindset in managing our transportation system resources is important. It will change our Built and Forget attitude to an entirely customer sensitive and oriented transportation services. The operation focus aided with the Intelligent Transport System technologies requires close cooperation between the public and private sectors in ensuring the provision of hightechnologies onto the infrastructure is compatible, interoperable and acceptable. Therefore, there is a need to restructure the role of institutional relationship by ways of encouraging public and private partnership in deploying customer oriented transportation system services. With information about the transportation system being crucial to the real time operations and management of the transportation system, it is important that the information exchange and sharing mechanism in both the internal and external relationship among the various institutions need to be strengthened. This aspect on how to strengthen and to build institution relationship is most lacking in the current planning of transportation improvement strategies. This concept of strategic transportation planning process can be best illustrated by the Regional Strategies for Sustainable Intermodal Transportation Enterprise ( Res/Site ) modal developed by MIT of America. The schematic process for this transportation planning model is illustrated by Figure 2 below: Scenarios Analysis Strategic Issues, Directions and Options Strategic Plans

7 The strength of this modal compared to the traditional transportation planning model lies in its ability in allowing the decision-makers to examine different logical scenarios of the future and develop strategies that can accommodate these different scenarios. The process of developing these strategies is strategic in nature and does not only focus into project identification or selection. Therefore, the planning output goes beyond infrastructure facilities planning to include the development of a regional architecture. This regional architecture defines how the region manages transportation systems from an institutional point of view. It proposes the appropriate management and organization set-up necessary to manage the proposed infrastructure resources. It also describes how communication and information technologies be employed to optimize the transportation system resources to cater for the growing needs of the customers. This planning model thus incorporates technological innovations in enhancing the provision of transportation system services to customers. Through the use of ICT in particular the Intelligent Transport System technologies, we can influence the travel pattern and behavior, make our system resources more responsive to changing travel needs, improves the accessibility and safety of the users and assist them in the travel decision making. Some of these Intelligent Transport System Services which utilises technologies to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the existing transportation system infrastructures are as illustrated in Table 1.

8 Table 1: Intelligent Transport System Services Advanced Transportation Management Systems Advanced Traveler Information Systems Advanced Public Transportation Systems Commercial Vehicle Operation Systems Network management, including incident management, traffic light control, electronic toll collection, congestion prediction and congestion-ameliorating strategies. Information provided to travelers pre-trip and during the trip in the vehicle. ATMS helps provide real-time network information. Passenger information and technologies to enhance system operations, including fare collection, intramodal and intermodal transfers, scheduling, headway control. Technologies to enhance commercial fleet productivity, including weigh-in-motion (WIM), pre-clearance procedures, electronic log books, interstate coordination. For example, the Advanced Transportation Management System integrates the various existing road network real time traffic information to optimize the roadway capacity and enhance congestion relieve strategies, while the Advanced Traveler Information System assists the traveler with up-to-date travel information in their trip planning. Advanced Public Transportation System provides passenger information and technologies to enhance public transport system operation including better fare collection, intermodal and intramodal transfers, scheduling and reliable headway control. The Commercial Vehicle Operation System enhances the commercial vehicle fleet management to improve productivity of their fleets and the operational efficiency. 4.0: Conclusions As a conclusion, I would like to say that sustainable urban development is feasible only if there is a sustainable transportation system, and a sustainable transportation system can only be developed through a strategic transportation planning process that is responsive and adaptive to the changing environment and caters for the customer needs. Intelligent Transport System Services fulfill such needs without resorting to immense construction of road infrastructure facilities.

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10 References: (1) Leong, S.M., Creating A Sustainable Intelligent Trans por t Sys tem Environm ent, 7 th W or ld Congres s on Intelligent Tr ansport System, 6-9 Nov, 2000, Turino, I taly. ( 2) Leong, S.M., Intelligent T ranspor t Sys tem - A new wave in m anaging ur ban transport, The 3 rd Asia Pacific Sem inar on Next Generation M obile Comm unication 2002, 1 st August 2002, Kuala L um pur, Malaysia. ( 3) Joseph M. Sussman and Christopher Conklin, Regional Strategies for the Sustainable Intermodal Transportation Enterprise (RES/SITE), Transportation Research Board, 80 th Annual meeting, Washington, DC, Jan