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- Benchmarking city layouts: a methodological approach and an accessibility comparison between a real city and the garden cityPublication . Monteiro, João Pedro Medina; Sousa, Nuno; Jesus, Eduardo Natividade; Rodrigues, João CoutinhoThis article presents a comparative accessibility study between a real city and its redraft as a Garden City. The benchmarking methodology involves defining and evaluating a location-based accessibility indicator in a GIS environment for the city of Coimbra, Portugal, and for the same city laid out as a Garden City, with the same number of inhabitants, jobs, and similar number of urban facilities. The results are derived as maps and weighted average distances per inhabitant to the facilities and jobs, and show that, for the Garden City, average distances drop to around 500 m for urban facilities and 1500 m for the combination of facilities and jobs, making much of the city accessible by walking and practically the whole of it accessible by cycling, with positive impact on transport sustainability and accessibility equity. The methodology can be extended to other benchmarking indicators and city layouts, and the quantitative results it yields make a valuable contribution to the debate on the ideal layout of cities. Moreover, it gives directions on how to improve real cities to address current and future sustainability concerns.
- Filling in the spaces: compactifying cities towards accessibility and active transportPublication . Monteiro, João Pedro Medina; Para, Marvin; Sousa, Nuno; Jesus, Eduardo Natividade; Ostorero, Carlo; Rodrigues, João CoutinhoCompactification of cities, i.e., the opposite of urban sprawl, has been increasingly presented in the literature as a possible solution to reduce the carbon footprint and promote the sustainability of current urban environments. Compact environments have higher concentrations of interaction opportunities, smaller distances to them, and the potential for increased active mode shares, leading to less transport-related energy consumption and associated emissions. This article presents a GIS- based quantitative methodology to estimate on how much can be gained in that respect if vacant spaces within a city were urbanized, according to the municipal master plan, using four indicators: accessibility, active modal share, transport energy consumption, and a 15-minute city analysis. The methodology is applied to a case study, in which the city of Coimbra, Portugal, and a compact version of itself are compared. Results show the compact layout improves all indicators, with averages per inhabitant improving by 20% to 92%, depending on the scenario assumed for cycling, and is more equitable.
- Bike-Index: um índice de acessibilidade velocípede recorrendo a programação em ambiente SIGPublication . Sousa, Nuno; Jesus, Eduardo Natividade; Rodrigues, João CoutinhoUm índice de acessibilidade velocípede – Bike-Index – é apresentado, baseado no esforço metabólico do ciclista como medida da impedância entre origens e destinos e nas limitações impostas por esse esforço. Adequado para estudar a acessibilidade velocípede em cidades declivosas, o Bike-Index requer um Sistema de Informação Geográfica e a programação de scripts nesse ambiente. A metodologia de cálculo é apresentada e aplicada a um caso-deestudo, a cidade de Coimbra, Portugal, e os resultados revelam que a acessibilidade está dependente tanto da centralidade como do relevo, sendo que este penaliza zonas de encosta e planaltos mal servidos de equipamentos urbanos.