Network-merge : reliable accessibility from door to door. More and more there is a need for exploring the potential benefits of a better linking of highways en subsidiary roads in regard to improving the accessibility in our country. New in this issue is the perspective of the road user: what benefits are there to him when the subsidiary roads play a bigger part? When can he travel from door to door within an acceptable time range? Not only regional governments but also the national government are interested in this new approach, working at the Mobility Plan. Working for the Ministry of Transport en Public Works Goudappel Coffeng carried out an exploratory study on this issue in the regions Noord-Brabant en Zuid-Holland for the year 2020. We applied a set of door to door accessibility-requirements, distinguishing between different distance-categories. This is implemented in the traffic and transport models of both regions to evaluate the changes in accessibility for the road user. Next to - or in stead of - roadways, crossroads are important contributors to delays on subsidiary and municipal roads. Therefore a collection of crossroads is fed into the traffic and transport models, to be able to assess these delays as well. The first findings show that investing in subsidiary roads (especially the crossroads!) improves the accessibility for all road users. At the same time it’s clear that investing in both highways and subsidiary roads is necessary, and that different regions will ask for a different balance between those two. (Author/publisher)
Abstract