PROPOSAL FOR POTENTIAL TOD ASSESSMENT ON STATIONS AND PUBLIC TRANSPORT LOCATIONS: Building planning scenarios at a metropolitan scale
Scenario planning; TOD index; sustainable development
A disconnection between transport and land use policies have reinforced urban sprawling processes and motorized transport dependency in metropolises worldwide. In this context, some Brazilian cities have invested in medium to high-capacity transport technologies as a mean to solve urban mobility issues. However, these actions have yet to be followed by any land use intervention, in order to reduce inequalities in urban activity accessibility and to produce more sustainable mobility, which raise questions of such investment’s potential of enabling sustainable development in these metropolises. Therefore, this study proposes a methodology, at a metropolitan scale, for potential TOD assessment on stations and other locations with medium to high-capacity public transport infrastructure in their surrounding areas, through indices built from the Transport-Oriented Development (T.O.D) integrated planning concept. Thus, the proposed framework was used to assess TOD potentiality on stations and other transport location in the Metropolitan Region of Salvador for two planning scenarios – one for the current public transport network and land use patterns, taking year 2020 as a reference, and another for the expected network in 2030, considering that actual land use patterns remain the same. The resulting comparison showed that the large investments made in the public transport network are not prone to create areas with high TOD potential since, in general, regions with less attracting land use assets for implementing stations are receiving ones with high capacity, whilst candidate regions for sustaining such infrastructure were overlooked or are meant to receive technologies bellow their transport-related needs. Aside from that, method outcomes became tools when analyzing possible transport and land use strategies for individual locations, which allowed experience build-up through an interactive learning process. Finally, the proposed methodology is adequate to fulfill research objectives and contributes to the portfolio of planning techniques adapted the reality of developing countries.