Constructing urban dynamic transportation planning strategies for improving quality of life and urban sustainability under emerging growth management principles

Abstract

Since the beginning of twenty-first century, urban development worldwide has successively deviated from our ideal design and original plans. There have subsequently accompanied numerous urban problems, such as congestion, serious air pollution, urban endlessly sprawl and inappropriate land development with low urban density. All of these features we often called urban illnesses significantly created negative influence to our urban life. The growth management concepts were thus emerged firstly to confront such negative influence. Not uniquely, numerous developed countries also failed to achieve its initial development strategy goals and soon afterwards implemented a more specific and essential strategies in which it introduced three innovative growth constructions: smart growth, sustainable growth, and inclusive growth. They confidently claimed that urban development would certainly improve quality of life (QoL) if the concept of development may be replaced by the concept of growth. Following various innovative growth constructions or management principles, contemporary urban agents including practical planners or official decision units, thus could pursue urban sustainable development and QoL simultaneously.Based on the current status and development processes, this study aimed at the urban transportation planning strategy and its dynamics according to the advanced international experiences. Firstly, this study surveyed international experiences or researches related to quality of life concepts, growth management principles as well as sustainable transport issues. Secondly, we then make an effort to identify critical sustainable transportation indicators under various growth constructions or management principles through the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) modeling results. The FDM requires repetitive surveys to confirm the final convergent values of all expert opinions and exclude less feasible sustainable transportation indicators at the same time. Thirdly, the Dynamic Network Process (DNP) was also applied to the expert survey to obtain four different weights during the period from 2014 to 2040 in response to actual changes or future trends of each indicator we selected. And then this research combined Gray Forecasting Model (GFM) to reflect changes or trends of each indicator over time by above several DNP surveys for making more realistic and suitable priorities or weights to achieve the efficiency of resource allocation. Finally, this study tried to conduct an empirical analysis with New Taipei City in Taiwan to indicate our planning philosophy and consequently validate planning strategies emphasized by this study. We believes that research frameworks and findings here not only provide new insights into the functioning of current growth constructions or management principles, but also could be used as a well reference basis for practical planners or official decision units to facilitate QoL and urban sustainability in further.