SPINTRENDS

National Road Authorities (NRA’s) face fundamental challenges in the way their networks are being planned and operated. To deal with this rapidly changing context NRA’s require a shift towards a collaborative planning approach: multi modal infrastructure is planned in collaboration with spatial developments addressing a broad scope towards the network performance. The Daily Urban System scale appears to be the most meaningful scale for optimizing the long-distance and last-mile networks of transportation in collaboration with regional spatial development.

Therefore, the research in SPINTRENDS builds upon a basic idea:

managing road networks (NRA) + managing demand of the future (spatial planning) = effective and future proof road networks

The overall objective of the research project SPINTRENDS is to finally provide CEDR with a vision document and a roadmap toward a collaborative planning approach. The vision as well as the roadmap will base on a compilation of the most up-to-date mobility and spatial development trends and an inventory of good practices of innovative measures and concepts. The results of SPINTRENDS should support NRA’s on their route towards using a collaborative planning approach to ensure future-proof road networks.

The proposed methodology for this research puts practice based research in the centre.

The first phase is dedicated to provide a solid basis for the development of the vision as well as the roadmap. It will consist of the identification of trends in mobility and spatial development, resulting in a structured description of these trends including interdependencies and influence factors. Furthermore, it includes the screening of innovative measures and concepts that can deal with the identified trends. This screening will lead to a catalogue of generic concepts and solutions and will therefore serve as overview of good practices and applications.

In the second phase, a vision document for collaborative planning will be prepared in an iterative 5-step-approach by combining and analysing the results of the first phase. Based on the vision document a roadmap that clarifies the route towards collaborative planning for future-proof road networks will be prepared. The roadmap will define short- and medium-term actions and transitions needed to reach the objectives mentioned in the vision.

The benefits to road administrations at both national and transnational level: The vision document as well as the roadmap developed within SPINTREND will contribute to the interests of NRA’s directly and indirectly. Applying them will lead to an improved integration of various transport modes in the daily urban system in cooperation with integrative planning approaches. This will enhance the performance of highway networks and improves their functionality as access modes to urban regions and as modes for long distance transport on the European Ten T corridors. Furthermore, this will contribute to the economic competitiveness and quality of living environment in urban regions. Together, these outcomes could strengthen NRA’s social license to operate not only with a more integral scope but also across Europe, noticing the importance of the quality of the intra-European road network.

The SPINTRENDS project is funded by the Conference of European Directors of Roads (CEDR) in the framework of the research programme CEDR Call 2017: Collaborative Planning. The participating National Road Authorities (NRAs) in this CEDR-Call are Austria, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The research budget is jointly provided by these NRAs.