Relocating public services: analysing the effects on sustainable mobility in the Helsinki Region

The mobility-related effects of local service networks were addressed in the Helsinki Region Transport System Plan (HLJ 2011). This identified the need to study the effects of the public service relocations from the point of view of mobility.

Some 30% of all trips terminate at a public or private service. Based on this, it can be estimated that the origin or destination of about half of all trips is a service. The location of services, inevitably, influences people’s daily life. Changes in the service network can have significant impacts on the length of a journey, the modes of transport used, and the time spent.

In the JULKI project (Analysing the Impacts of Local Public Service Networks on Sustainable Mobility, in 2011-2012), the impacts of the relocations of public services on people’s daily lives and their mobility patterns were studied from the perspective of sustainable mobility. Several cases were studied in order to find out how mobility and traffic patterns and their costs have changed due to the relocation of certain services.

Implementation

The starting point of the work was to map the key services in terms of mobility and the number of visits to those services. In addition, the current trends of developing public services and residents' opinions and wishes were analysed. The impacts caused by the changes in the public service network were analysed through 3 case studies. A survey on mobility patterns was conducted among physiotherapy customers in Helsinki, and among maternity clinic customers in Espoo. The third case was the school network of Sipoo, which was studied based on the results of an extensive traffic survey.

A simulation model was also used to identify the travel chains of the customers of the case studies. Conclusions and recommendations on how to develop the service network were produced. In addition, generalised models of how to estimate quantitative impacts on mobility resulting from the changes in the service network were developed.

Conclusions

The study concluded that when a revision of the service network is being planned, the future development plans of the transport system, especially concerning public transport, should be considered. This also applies the other way round.

Local services should be at a walking distance from customers, and services used less regularly should be located in nodes of good public transport connections. In terms of mobility, a reasonably dense local service network is a network in which one service point serves an area of 5-10 km2. If the service area is larger than 20 km2, the network is too sparse from the point of view of mobility.

The sparser the service network, the longer the trips made by customers and the smaller the share of trips made on foot. It can be estimated that an increase of a 1 km2 in the service area reduces the modal share of walking to the service by 1%. In all, longer trips lead to increasing socio-economic costs of individual trips and mobility.

 

Photo: Helsinki Region Transport

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Themes

Country:
Finland
Year:
2011