| With Chinese economics development, the urbanization process has quickly expanded the size of the cities and their populations, associated with increased travel demand. The transit planning, in terms of its theory and practice, has been challenged by motorized travel modes and various patterns of land use developments. The metropolitan cities in China are facing increasing congestions due to fundamental issues stemmed from transportation system structure. Apparently the current transportation supplies cannot meet the transportation needs. Under this context, the study aimed at incorporating the concept of "sustainable development" into "transit priority" planning theory, that is, "sustainable transit development strategies, to develop a strategic planning system to ensure sustainable transit development for transit city.After reviewing previous urban and transportation development experiences in China and abroad to conclude their findings, this study proposed a set of planning theories and practice approaches which could utterly fit for Chinese metropolitan areas to achieve the goal of sustainable transit development. The main contents of the study include:Establishing "sustainable transit development strategies". The principle objective of the theory is to ensure that the development of transit is consistent with the goals and needs set for the urban development in five dimensions. The core problem is to deal with the interactions between the land use development, establishment distribution, transportation construction and city development. A critical principle is to guarantee the society equity between different levels of peoples.Developing a study platform based on transit and environment analysis models. The qualitative analysis of transit development strategies would not be feasible without the platform. The evaluation system consists of society impact, economic opportunity enhancement of transportation functions, environment impact and resource usage. A complex index can be derived by applying a comprehensive evaluation method. This index can be used for evaluating and ranking various transit strategies.Developing a "sustainable transit development strategy" resource warehouse. The resource warehouse includes the transit development strategies from four categories, such as the consistency between transit and urban development, transit system management, transit system planning and transit infrastructure management. The suitable strategies should be determined after the identification of problems. The development of such warehouse is to provide the decision makers options and standardize their decision process.Building a feedback system. The sustainable development cannot be achieved by one step. Through the circle of "Evaluation- Identify Problem- Find Solutions -Implement-Re-evaluation" process, the problems can be identified, thus corresponding solutions can be determined and implemented to achieve the preset sustainable goals.A case study on Shenzhen has been conducted following the proposed study approaches. According to the current transportation problems and future needs, six transit development strategies have been proposed and implemented in a quantitative analysis platform based on Shenzhen regional demand model and environmental evaluation model to evaluate their impacts. The evaluation results have been elaborated based on the proposed theories in this study. For one strategy which cannot achieve the goals, it has been improved by combing with other transit strategies obtained from strategy resource warehouse. It is evaluated repeatedly to make sure it could meet the sustainable development goals and future transportation needs. Eventually, the case study proved that the proposed transit planning system has demonstrated strong capability for supporting strategic level decision. |
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