Speakers Bio & Abstract

Biography
Ralph Klerkx is a Program manager at TNO of the Smart Cities program: “Sustainable Urban Accessibility and Mobility (SUAM)”. TNO is an independent research organization that connects people and knowledge to create innovations that boost the sustainable competitive strength of industry and well-being of society. The SUAM program develops integral solutions to enable cities to improve their accessibility and subsequent health and economic vitality permanently.Abstract
Sustainable Urban Accessibility and MobilityIn a lot of European cities, the pressure on urban space is high. Residents, businesses and visitors have different demands on the environment which are difficult to combine. Who intervenes in urban areas and large-scale infrastructure serves as a tightrope walker balancing between divergent interests. After all, an intervention in a one area has almost always effect in other areas. For instance, you can boost the air quality of a city district by allowing access exclusively to clean trucks or by rerouting all freight traffic. But the two measures turn out quite differently when it comes to accessibility and traffic safety. Short and long term planning in such area’s requires a more interactive and integral approach. To support this TNO is developing tools which supports decision making on operational, tactical and strategical level: City Dashboard and Urban Strategy

City Dashboard: Within a city there is much to optimize on the operational level, including the settings of traffic lights, parking directions and route information panels. All these systems can be aligned and thereby provide a lot of data. This data can be processed into information that can be used for city authorities to evaluate effects of traffic measures on accessibility, health and economy and can be used to predict future situations. To support this we are working on a city Dashboard with data processing and data driven modeling backbone.

Urban Strategy: Urban Strategy makes it possible to develop spatial plans with various parties for an urban environment. This is made possible by making information from linked, state-of-the-art models interactively accessible. With Urban Strategy it is possible to do all sorts of interventions in the physical environment. Roads and houses for example, can be removed or added. Within a short time, one can see what effects this has on aspects such as noise, traffic, air quality, sustainability, health, quality of life and external security.