Smortr > Ganesh Babu > How far can you go in 15 mins in the Netherlands?
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How far can you go in 15 mins in the Netherlands?
How far can you go in 15 mins in the Netherlands?
About 1/3 of CO2 emissions and 1/4 of the air pollution in urban areas are caused by mobility and transport. It is extremely important to reduce this if we want to achieve our targets of net zero by 2050.
Project Details
Project Details
Design Sector: Urban Planning
Typology: Transport Corridors
Scope/Role: Data Analysis
Location: Netherlands
Year: 2023
Status: In Progress
If choosing the car is more convenient, then more people would choose it over public transport. In some of the biggest cities in the country like Amsterdam and Utrecht, the public transport is the better choice or as good as the automobile.
This could be due to two reasons, one, high quality public transport coupled with relevant polices (autoluw and the likes of it) and two, traffic congestion. While electric cars can address the pollution problem of cars, they can't address the congestion problem of cars.
In the smaller cities in this list, the car can get you farther. This could be due to their relative position in the urban network, the car-oriented urban planning and policies and the resultant low densities and lower congestion.
If we plot the area covered in 15 mins by both modes of transportation(in hecatares), interesting patterns emerge.
Size of the bubbles represent the population of the cities. We only took accessible areas into the calculation, and not inaccessible areas like lakes/forests.
What we see is that, most cities have a smaller variance in the area that could be accessed by public transport compared to the area accessed by car. The area covered by cycling and public transit in 15 minutes ranges from the lowest in Zaanstad at 2259 ha to highest in Enschede at 4484 ha, almost twice as much as Zaanstad.
Here the same data is plotted with an exaggerated Y axis to highlight the differences between the cities.
There is high variance in the area that could be accessed by car in 15 minutes in the different cities. With the lowest in Amsterdam at 1902 ha to highest in Zoetermeer at 11,389 ha, almost six times as much as Amsterdam. Also, Amsterdam is the only city where you could reach farther by public transport+cycle in 15 mins than the car. Followed by Utrecht, where the difference between the modes is minimal.
What would be ideal then?
What would be ideal then?
In my opinion, the metric of 15 mins is the most crucial one. In a modern city of the 21st century that puts people and the planet first, public transport and cycling should be able to get you as far as the car can or even farther in 15 minutes, anything else is only putting the car and its problems first.
Notes on the process:
Notes on the process:
I used the travel time API to calculate the isochrones in
QGIS. The comparison was between cycling+ public transport on one hand and the car on the other hand.
All calculations start on a Monday at 8:00 AM during the peak hours to take the average traffic situation and the public transport timetable into consideration. The isochrones don't take inaccessible areas without roads like lakes and forests into the calculation.
More questions:
More questions:
I started making this with the assumption that there wouldn't be a huge differences in the area accessed by the different modes between the cities. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. The Netherlands is still largely catering to the car.
It would be interesting to see if public transport can gain an advantage with higher time intervals of 30mins, 45 mins and 1 hour in a more regional setting.
Ganesh Babu
Urbanist in Rotterdam
I love cities and their idiosyncrasies. My life’s mission is to work towards understanding and documenting the myriad of complex systems that make cities possible while developing sustainable solutions to fixing the most pressing issues facing them.
Smortr > Ganesh Babu > How far can you go in 15 mins in the Netherlands?
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