Mobility and Urban Planning Integration at City-regional Level in the Design of Urban Transport Interchanges (EC FP7 NODES Project–Task 3.2.1.)

Nodes is a European Commission R&D project aiming to build a toolbox to support European cities in the design and operation of new or upgraded public transport interchanges. NODES seeks to find the most innovative approaches to key areas in this arena such as design, ICT, management models, energy and environment. The Madrid Transports Consortium (CRTM) has led the work on the topic ‘Integrated land use and infrastructure planning’ (Task 3.2), which is a long standing mantra for planning policies and proved to be difficult in practice. This document describes a first section (3.2.1) that focuses on the city-regional scale: a theoretical framework is developed for a further understanding of the question, whereas a first tool is proposed for a complete assessment and diagnosis of the public transport network, urban integration, the relationship with land uses and the strategic role of a node within the whole network. This tool may also enable more prompt detection of areas for intervention and/or investment. Second, a simpler tool can guide a new interchange project by evaluating an array of different scenarios at a city-regional level by a selection of indicators that identify the optimal scenario for interchange performance.