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Transport planning practice is experiencing rapid transitions. This shifting professional environment is prompting lively and sometimes bitter debates about how transportation models should be used. While these models and their outputs play an increasingly more important function in transport-related decision-making processes, growing concerns emerge about their limitations, assumptions, biases, and usability. This paper addresses the question of how different professionals involved in transportation planning perceive and experience these tensions. For that purpose, we developed an online survey which was completed by 229 European transport planning practitioners, primarily working in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Our findings support the following key conclusions. First, and contrary to popular notions on the matter, practitioners are relatively satisfied with the models they use. Second, most respondents are confident that they understand the assumptions and uncertainties associated with transport models, but that other important stakeholders do not. However, third, the larger the distance that respondents have to hands-on working experience with transportation models, the lower is their trust on model outputs. Respondents who are not directly involved in the operation of the models a) report more negative experiences associated with model use in decision-making processes and b) identify more usability barriers. The overall picture revealed a lack of trust amongst transport planning professionals, which is a problem needing to be addressed. We propose bringing models closer to those who use their outputs as a constructive solution to this trust deficit.

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In recent years, the city of Munich has become more crowded due to its strong job market and its popularity as a tourist destination, resulting in a shortage of affordable housing and a strained transport network. It became evident that the city of Munich could not solve these problems alone, and would need close cooperation with neighboring municipalities that considered the various stakeholders. In 2007, this resulted in the formation of the Metropolitan Region of Munich, home to nearly six million people from 27 counties and 6 large cities, and includes 158 participating institutions. In 2009, the TUM Accessibility Atlas was developed for this newly formed region after numerous discussions with a variety of regional stakeholders who described their needs in assessing land-use and transport measures. The major task of this tool was to meet these needs and support this diverse region find a common regional identity.Keywords Accessibility . Accessibility instruments . PSS . Governance . Decisionmaking . Accessibility planning The TUM Accessibility Atlas brings together various scientific measures of accessibility that have been developed over time and applies them to relevant issues in the field of integrated land use and transport planning. The primary usability issue addressed by this tool is the need for more trust and a shared language between stakeholders. The main planning issue is determining how the region can improve multimodal accessibility, becoming more environmentally sustainable while also identifying spatial and socioeconomic disparities to address. Given these purposes, the TUM Accessibility Atlas was set up as a GIS toolbox, capable of producing maps for specific case studies and their thematic issues. The two major datasets are a multi-modal transport network and the structural land-use layers. The public transport network is based on a VISUM transport model imported into a GIS based accessibility instrument. Initially, the street network was initially provided by the Bavarian State Office for Statistics and Data Processing, but later substituted by OpenStreetMap (OSM), due to the flexibility of the open source data and the greater detail available for non-motorized transport modes. The structural component was provided by numerous sources (e.g. gaining suitable data by web survey) which included geo-referenced data on activities and their respective densities. These datasets have been constantly updated and upgraded in line with the current issues of different areas. Over the course of various research projects, new scales and suitable add-on tools have been added. To help visualize spatial and socioeconomic disparities, the TUM Accessibility Atlas has explored the relative accessibility of the region by public vs private transport, mismatches between the population density and public transport service quality, and the vulnerability of the region to future increases in mobility costs. Different methods and scales have been integrated: from micro-scale accessibility within neighborhood...

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