| SUMMARY OF THE KEY ISSUES IN PLANNING AND MEASURES Planning is the key action for the achievement of good air quality characteristics in nowadays urban centres. This typical activity by local administrations allows to manage short term episodes of high pollution and to limit pollutants emissions in the medium and long term, thus minimising the frequency of occurrence of such events. Planning means to decide what to do, on various temporal and spatial scales, for reaching a desired objective. When the goal is air quality, then planning means to identify the best mix of short term actions and long term measures that makes up the optimal ‘policy’ for reducing overall pollutants emissions and, in particular, to lower the pollution levels in the areas where limit values are exceeded. The planning activities normally include the use of software models for predicting the behaviour of the complex system on which we act: the urban environment. These models include a variety of categories and a number of alternatives within each category. Key examples of such models are traffic, emission and pollutant dispersion models. INTEGAIRE’s best practice database includes a number of topics related to planning. These topics have been organised in a framework based on four areas of investigation: • Planning activities in general The topics that relate to planning activities deal with some of the fundamental questions that the planners have to reply: • How can we implement the air quality Action Plans requested
by EC directives? Measures addressing transport are among the most important measures that ‘planners can plan’ for reducing pollutants emissions given the relevance that today’s urban traffic has compared to the other sectors of activity (industry, residential areas). These measures have been categorised into four sets depending on the element of the mobility chain on which they have an impact: • mobility demand measures, acting on the first link of the chain
i.e. the mobility users (e.g. taxation and tolling), Transport related measures can have a short and long term character and they are an ingredient of air quality action plans, mobility plans, urban traffic plans. Conceptually, measures relating to land use are of two types: • measures which include the change of land use, possibly in
a more environmental direction (e.g. pedestrian areas, or relocation
of business activities); The topics on measures are linked to examples of applications of such measures in a variety of cities, including of course the cities in INTEGAIRE. Land use related measures are always long term measures, and belong to the Urban Planning sector of activity. They cannot be used for managing short term pollution episodes but they are a key element of a long term policy for a sustainable transport system and the respect of air quality legislation. Also models for planning are grouped into categories such as land use and traffic models, pollutant emission models, atmospheric dispersion models, integrated suites of models. The topic templates provided are linked to examples of applications of such models types. A large number of software tools is referenced in the various topics, and criteria of quality are also proposed for the sake of the credibility of planning analyses results. The overall puzzle offered by the Planning section of INTEGAIRE best practice database should offer to the reader the possibility to develop a decision making process, which starts from the basic questions on ‘what to do’, searches for ‘ways to achieve’ by looking at the many possible measures, and identifies tools for designing and assessing the selected measures within the ‘Modelling for Planning’ area.
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