Open Access

With the neighbourhood concept developed in the ZED Lighthouse, the actors involved are not only trying to meet the growing demand for local mobility through a research mobility station with neighbourhood caretaker as well as age-appropriate e-scooters and autonomous boxes for e-scooters. Rather, this concept also opens up perspectives and offers all the necessary aids for older people to be able to live in their familiar neighbourhood – and thus also to keep the neighbourhood itself structurally stable. With the help of user-friendly and participatory technology development, those affected are involved in the creation of new (socio-)technical solutions. The blueprint from Zwickau-Marienthal creates new perspectives, especially for large housing estates with homogeneous age structures, to bind their residents to the neighbourhood in the long term and to keep the estates liveable and lively into old age.

We propose a new method to estimate benefits of road network improvements, which allows to include the induced demand without arbitrary assumptions. Instead of estimating induced demand (which is nontrivial and hardly possible in practice), we search for demand induction where initial benefits are mitigated to zero. Such approach allows to formulate a dual measure of benefit, covering both the potential benefits and the likelihood of consuming them by the induced traffic. We first estimate benefits of road network improvement assuming that traffic demand is fixed. Consequently, we find demand model configurations at which the benefits of the new investment become null, i.e., all the initial benefits are consumed by the traffic demand growth. We call such states of induced demand the Lewis–Mogridge points of the analysed improvement. We select the most probable of such points and use it to calculate the proposed novel indicator μ, for which the initial benefits (obtained under a fixed-demand assumption) are multiplied with a demand increase rate needed to consume them. We believe that such measure allows to include the critical phenomena of induced traffic and, at the same time, to overcome problems associated with reliable estimation of induced demand. As we illustrate with the case of two alternative road improvement schemes in Kraków, Poland, the proposed method allows to estimate maximal threshold of induced traffic and to select scenario more resilient to induced traffic.