FLOW congestion impact assessment tool for walking and cycling

Summary

Currently, many cities do not have standardised evaluation methodologies for non-motorised measures. The FLOW assessment procedure gives cities across Europe the possibility to better evaluate – qualitatively and quantitatively – a wide range of effects across multiple disciplines. This helps to systematically assess the congestion reduction potential of walking and cycling and at the same time to cover environmental, social and economic aspects within one integrated tool.

The tool‘s multimodal indicators are able to measure the impacts on the transport network performance in addition to environmental, societal and economic impacts for all transport modes and can be used for both ex-ante assessments and for ex-post evaluations. In this manner, effects of hard measures, such as infrastructure investments (e.g. bike lanes, cycle highways or squares), as well as soft measures (e.g. mobility management campaigns) can be appraised.

The tool’s integrated target system serves as a basis for the determination of the whole set of indicators in a second step. Depending on the local political objectives of the city and on the availability of required input data, FLOW offers different multimodal approaches for aggregating the impacts of walking and cycling measures. A city can thereby select which measure(s) best suit its priorities:

• Multi-criteria analysis (MCA)
• Weighted benefit analysis (WBA)
• Cost-benefit analysis (CBA)
• Qualitative appraisal (only as add-on to CBA)