Urban mobility is continuously growing in Spanish and most European cities. Cities are becoming the core centre of great metropolitan areas, where most of the country's activity is concentrated, and Madrid is a good example of the latter. New activities are attracted and others are regenerated,producing a demand of new places where activities are to be located, and therefore significant changes in land use are produced. The area under theinfluence of the core city, and where these activities are to be located,is increasingly more difficult to define and geographically delimit, partly due to an intense process of decentralization of production, commercialand employment activities, usually grouped in new monocentric clusters. Many factors, including type and price of housing, services, urban environment or the search for natural surroundings is influencing this tendency. While companies are located in places with good road accessibility but close enough to the core to maximise efficiency (proximity to customers, employees and suppliers), population choose to live in places where type and price of housing fulfil their taste and their socioeconomic conditions, leaving distance to work as a secondary consideration. The fact that most families have more than one employed member makes even more difficult to evaluate work location as a key issue for housing location choice. The result is a huge increase in the number of movements, distance travelled, and stages within the trip. It is believed that mobility is not as radial as it used to be (core to suburbs) but increasingly lateral (suburb to suburb), with significant implications in transport planning, energy efficiency, timeexpenditure and environmental conditions. The generalised use of private cars is actually feeding this process, creating a never ending demand for new road infrastructures. A huge increase of potential origins and destinations and their dispersion makes public transport a very difficult option,both in terms of demand and supply, as it is not currently an alternativefor very complex, dispersed and multipurpose movements unless new approaches to the problem are developed. As an example, data from the 1996 and 2004 surveys of Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid (CTRM), points out that there has been a significant increase in the number of motorised trips, rising from 1.94 motorised trips per inhabitant in 1996 to 3.08 in 2004 (an increase of 60%). While private vehicle motorised trips have increased by 74%, public transport trips have increased by 33%. In general, there is a tendency of localising new commercial centres, offices and generalservices at the surroundings of high capacity roads, facilitating a better access to private transport than to public transport. This study considers the new mobility patterns that, according to the general data, are becoming more relevant in Madrid Metropolitan Area. A GIS with data on population density, employment, trips generated and attracted and the mode of transport is required in order to acquire enough information to understand these new patterns and their characteristics. The aim is then to propose policy alternatives, new transport options and guidelines for the future in order to decrease transport problems and their consequences for the environment. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999
Abstract