The Methodological Guidebook is aimed at practitioners. Building on the logical structure set out in the Decision-Making Guidebook, it presents a coherent but flexible general approach to planning for a sustainable urban land use/transport system (Chapters 1-2), then goes on to offer methods of carrying out the steps of that logical structure (Chapters 3-7). To be useful in a variety of circumstances, it offers a choice of methods and approaches, all compatible with general rules of good planning and with the overarching sustainability objective. Particular emphasis, however, is on a new logical method of appraising land use/transport strategies with respect to sustainability (Chapter 3), and on optimising with respect to sustainability (Chapter 7). Even if in the end, the planner will have to apply methods prescribed to her by national rules and regulations, we are confident that there will be ideas to be picked up from this part of the book. For each of the objectives set out in the Decision-makers’ Guidebook, performance indicators will have to be devised. The Methodological Guidebook suggests such indicators (Chapter 3) and how to present them (Chapter 4). Chapters 8-16 provides detailed advice on how to compute them, including the elements of cost benefit analysis, equity indicators and environmental and accident indicators. Thus a large part of the book is concerned with performance indicators. The art of strategy formulation (combining policy instruments to achieve good results with respect to all objectives) is still in its infancy. However, Chapter 5 of the Methodological Guidebook takes us a little further. Advice on the use of models to predict impacts is given in Chapter 6. The new opportunities for visualisation of model results provided by GIS can only be exploited to the full if one respects simple rules for effective visual communication. This is the topic of Chapter 17. Chapter 18 treats the subject of optimisation algorithms. Finally, Chapter 19 provides experience, taken from PROSPECTS case studies, with many of these methods in use. (Author/publisher)
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