Designing accompanying measures for the suburban railway scheme of Brussels.

Brussels is a metropolitan area of about 2.7 million inhabitants. Its central part, the "Brussels Region", is the Capital-City of Belgium, grouping a little less than 1 million inhabitants. The Region has lost population for 30 years (about 120,000 inhabitants), while economic activities - with a rather stable total number of jobs (about 650 000) - were undergoing an important mutation: strong decline of industrial and heavy tertiary activities and strong growth of administrative functions. The result of this evolution is a dramatic increase of the number of daily commuters, with a high proportion of people commuting by car and resultant traffic congestion. Since the efficiency of the Public transport networks is low, the Federal Government has decided to put in operation a large suburban railway scheme, called "RER or Reseau Express Regional" linking the suburbs to the central part of the metropolitan area. Several combined transport and land use policies have been studied to explore the possibilities of counterbalancing the accelerating effect of the RER on the urban sprawl and reversing the process of central-city decay. The aim of the study is to find the optimal accompanying measures cocktail, with particular emphasis given to modal shift, environmental and residential attractivity criteria. Envisaged accompanying measures are parking capacity restraints, parking fees, HOV lanes, bus lanes, inter-modal facilities, banning through traffic in the residential areas, road pricing (tolling or area pricing), land use planning (banning development in designated areas on the urban fringe), environmental impact fees and area development taxes. Exploration of their impacts is done with the help of an Integrated Land Use/Transport model and takes part in the negotiation process between the Belgian Federal State, the Brussels Region and both Wallonie and Flanders surrounding Regions. It is expected that it will lead to the agreement of a long-term comprehensive land use transport strategy between the three involved Regions and the Federal State.