Research projects

Demographic change means decline and aging of population. If there is no change in administrative planning, accessibility of public services in sparsely populated areas, cannot be guaranteed anymore. The consequence in sparsely populated rural areas would be a dramatic decrease of mobility of the “captive riders”, like older and younger persons, who will not be able anymore to meet their needs of everyday live. In order to react to these developments, administration and sectoral planning need an applicable instrument for infrastructural planning which allows measuring its impact on traffic. On this account the ILS −Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development will develop an instrument for the research project “Accessibility in rural areas”, cooperating with the Institute for Road and Transport Science (University of Stuttgart), which can be used to assess the impact of infrastructural measures on traffic. It will be used to simulate the impact of scenarios changing spatial structure (e.g. closing of public services) or adaptive planning measures (e.g. optimizing public transport). In addition, an indexing model will be created, including parameters like access to public service, quality of public transport and traffic infrastructure, main traffic flows as well as demographic parameters. The indexing model will be visualized in maps. Furthermore, realistic scenarios of accessibility will be analyzed, evaluated and presented to the public.