Exploring Seamless and Attractive Transfers to Public Transport Stations with Digital Tactical Urbanism

Kurzfassung

For tackling societal, health and environmental challenges, it is desirable to increase the share of people who use public transport combined with walking or cycling. Thus, it is important to make transfers to and within public transport stations by foot but also by bicycle attractive and seamless. To ensure that individuals actually enjoy walking, a pedestrian-friendly environment is an important prerequisite. However, taking public transport in urban areas can be challenging: the built environment and wayfinding outside of public transport stations is often lacking consideration and needs improvements to ensure pleasant walking or cycling to the station. Previous work has shown that, for example, the design of the environment at a bus stop has an influence on the extent to which journeys to and from the stop are made on foot or by bicycle, and what distance to the stop or waiting times at stops are considered acceptable. The present contribution delivers insights into an ongoing study that explores which factors are important for an attractive transfer to a public transport station by focusing on a major transport hub in Berlin, Germany: Berlin-Lichtenberg, which is a big regional train station with U-Bahn (subway), S-Bahn (urban railway) and regional train service (“Regionalbahn”) as well as buses in a densely populated area. The study aims at investigating how a public transport station’s surrounding should look like in order to attract people to walk or cycle to the station, specifically focusing on Tactical Urbanism (TU) measures. The research design originally planned to implement tactical urbanism (TU) measures created jointly with residents around the public transport station following a stakeholder workshop with decision makers. Unfortunately, the decision-makers participating in the stakeholder workshop pointed out the high bureaucratic barriers to implement TU measures in the district: every single measure needs to be justified based on mobility data for the area. This takes a lot of time and the need to get access to data from mobility providers, which is difficult. Hence, Digital Tactical Urbanism (DTU) was established as a way of implementing TU measures in a fast, efficient and immersive way. Firstly, an online survey was conducted to explore the needs, requirements and experiences of people who use the respective public transport station. The online survey was announced by posters and floor graphics in the public transport station, newsletters, flyers and online platforms. It took place from Juni 2023 – September 2023. The online survey addresses the importance of certain characteristics and services within and outside of the station as well as the people’s intermodal mobility behaviour and experiences of walking to/from the respective station. Secondly, the results from the online survey were used to build a 3D-model of TU measures, which were placed in four 360° picture of the stations’ surrounding. By wearing Virtual Reality glasses, the stations’ actual surrounding enriched by 3D-models of interventions could be explored in an immersive way. Thirdly, two workshops are planned in autumn 2023 where participants can explore the surrounding wearing the VR-glasses. Meanwhile, a semi-structured interview guideline is applied with which the interviewer can accompany the participant through the virtual world: a ‘digital walking interview’ is conducted. According to the results of the survey data, PT users want a clean and safe PT stations’ surrounding with a high quality of the walking environment: features such as greenery, seating options, aesthetics, security personnel, light, toilets, drinking fountains or good shops/gastronomy were desired the most. Furthermore, the access from the station to other modes of transport (e.g. bus or sharing options) and to the neighborhoods should be short and safe. Tactical Urbanism is considered as a participatory, low-cost instrument to intervene in urban space in order to highlight deficits in the physical environment or shortcomings in political and planning governing principles. Thus, it can contribute to the urban trans-formation process by including and empowering local actors and questioning current planning and decision-making principles. However, as the stakeholder workshop in this study has shown, it is difficult to intervene in urban space and physically change the urban environment surrounding public transport stations. The responsibilities are often unclear and planning processes, even though they may only be tactical and temporary, can be difficult to realize. As a consequence, this study applies virtual reality as a tool to create new visions of the station’s surrounding by introducing ‘Digital Tactical Ur-banism’. In areas with unclear planning responsibilities and hard-to-reach authorities, that often involve long-lasting decision processes, Digital Tactical Urbanism can be an option to make changes in the urban environment tangible, both for laypersons and for decision-makers, in a low-cost and fast way. By taking surveys or interviews before-hand as a bottom-up approach to gather public transport users’ opinions, the design elements included in the virtual world are shaped by the users’ needs, desires and re-quirements, thus meeting the demand of Tactical Urbanism.