Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Technological
System
Network
Scale
Acculturation
Expand Road
Network
Social
Response
Drive
More
Increase Tax
Collection
Adaptive
preferences
Scale
Learning
Institutional
Response
Figure 2.10
Conventional wisdom and the promotion of car-based mobility
Source
: Unruh, 2000.
more technical, local-scale, traffic problems. The larger scale, longer term and more open-
ended strategic decisions - which address technologies, climate change, energy use and
emissions, demographic change (including ageing), societal priorities (including equity), and
the types of cities that people and businesses would like to live in - all require innovative
thinking. This has large implications in research and practice as conventional study approaches
often have considerable inertia. However, where they are not suited to the problems being
faced, alternative methods are required.
A number of approaches have been developed to help overcome these difficulties. Scenario
analysis is one of these, and has been used since the 1950s, in fields such as military and
energy planning and corporate strategy. Scenarios are defined here as views of the (long) term
future, structured around alternative societal trends or policy priorities. Scenarios encompass
a wide range of external and internal factors into composite images of different potential future
lifestyles, providing a structured view of the future and framework for analysis. This is different
to the common usage in transport planning, where scenarios are conflated with option analysis,
considering marginal changes, such as in a route alignment or change in frequency of service.
