Re-designing collective travel

Summary

The Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route, currently under construction, is planned to be opened in early 2018. Together with other major infrastructure improvements already underway, this affords a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to optimise the Aberdeen City transport network in order to accommodate and encourage significant increases in active and collective travel modes. It should serve both current demand and that generated by future population and employment growth.

Implementing sustainable mobility

This will require an understanding of current and future travel demand and collective travel provision, interactions between modes, what influences mode choice, and defining a new strategic roads hierarchy. Alongside this, various (hard and soft) measures will be implemented to enable and encourage the increased use of active and collective travel modes, as opposed to single car occupancy.

The implementation of the measures will also help develop a significantly improved, high-quality collective transport network that has high frequency reliable services, optimal journey times and routes, easily accessible information, and simple ticketing. This will help efforts to make collective travel the main mode(s) of choice rather than single occupancy car trips.

Some of these measures will be part of the "City Centre Masterplan", as well as projects at Broad Street and Union Street that form part of the city's SUMP. Beyond that, other development is planned from Union Street along the A96 road to the neighbourhood of Dyce, Aberdeen International Airport, and further out towards the Aberdeenshire towns of Blackburn, Kintore and Inverurie. The sgnificant housing and employment growth foreseen along this road corridor precipitated the planned transport improvements.

The 1,000 space Dyce Park and Ride site has also recently opened. This site has electric charging infrastructure and parking spaces for bike, which have an opportunity to make this a "Collective Gateway". The "Gateway" should be transport interchange that welcomes people to Aberdeen and offers information on travel opportunities across the city and region. In addition, it should inform visitors about the park and choose facilities and potential future cycle hire scheme at Dyce itself.

The marketing of the park and choose site will be key to initiating and sustaining usage of this key transport facility.