Creating Liveable Neighborhoods through Context-Sensitive Multimodal Road Planning

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Improving mobility is seen as key to facilitating the economic uplift of the urban poor. In South Africa, the majority of the urban poor live on the periphery of cities. They travel long distances at great cost to go to work and school and are dependent on public transport and nonmotorized transport (NMT) (walking or cycling) for their travel needs. Despite legislation and policies that emphasize the role of public transport and NMT, road planning practice in South Africa continues to be automobile-centric. The needs of other road users are often overlooked, even in areas where they are in the majority. This paper describes the use of spatial multicriteria evaluation to rank modes according to their suitability at points along a defined route by using land use, socioeconomic, environmental, and transportation factors in combination to describe the contextual setting of the route. A case study conducted along an existing arterial route in Cape Town, South Africa, is used to demonstrate the method and the results of the analysis. The research finds that contextual regimes can be identified along the route and shows that each of these regimes has differing implications for the various modes that pass through these corridors.