Optimising Public Transport Planning with GI Methods
General, External sources ·Lecture given by Maximilian Kranabetter
Centering the Community in Geospatial Analyses
This class really helped me make the connection between the methods and software I have been learning about and using in other classes, especially my Methods in Spatial Analysis class, and the real-world application of these skills. Mr. Kranabetter’s case study for public transportation in Leogang, Austria reminded me of the assignments I have received in my Methods class but his work was more fully realized. This lecture showed me the limits of my work in that class to a degree and pushed me to expand my thinking on how to create and tackle the different scenarios presented to me in response to the weekly focus. In my classes I tend to focus on the geographical data and often neglect thinking of the community impact or societal data which might affect the outcome of the analysis. Data on the transportation habits of the community ended up being immensely helpful in drawing the best conclusions for his project. But often, those that are running spatial analyses can identify the best location for something but they miss the community context and thus their solution is rendered useless.
This reminded me of how the city I am from spent nearly half a billion dollars to construct a tram line through the city that, in the end, no one ever uses. The idea behind the new tram line was to revitalize the neighborhood that the tram runs through and connect important locations in the city. However, the city did not otherwise invest in the area that the tram runs through so nobody wants to use the tram and the people who live near the tram line cannot afford the tram or are not interested in traveling to the destinations along the tram line as they are mainly tourist attractions. On top of this, there are other means of transportation that are just as convenient that go to these tourist locations so the tram line was redundant. There has been a huge uproar over this failure in the city with many residents incensed that the city government wasted so much money. Mr.Kranabetter’s lecture made me reflect on how this all could have been avoided if the government had surveyed the community. Technically the tram line was feasible but practically it made no sense. In Mr. Kranabetter’s case, he tailored his solution to the community of focus which is incredibly important for the success of a project and loosing this focus can lead to costly mistakes
On that note, as one last point of reflection, I thought it was fantastically insightful for the Austrian government to create an open-sourced community survey so that data from a survey of this type only has to be done once but can be used by multiple projects and there is no replication of work. I have never encountered something like this before but I think innovative thinking like this can have a huge beneficial impact on community planning work and the likes and I think it’s a great model for other jurisdictions to replicate.