Everyday infrastructure changes, such as the construction of a new pedestrian bridge over a busy road, can affect the mobility choices of residents. Now, the startup company Plan4Better, a spinout from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed an urban planning tool to design cities where everyday destinations can be reached on foot or by bicycle within 15 minutes, announced TUM in a statement.
“With this tool, urban planners can develop scenarios and conduct evidence-based testing of the outcomes,” explains environmental engineer Ulrike Jehle, who co-founded Plan4Better GmbH with her colleague Elias Pajares, in the statement. The prototype for their planning tool, which contains extensive data on topics such as population density, space utilisation, pedestrian and cycling networks, and points of interest, was developed in a research project at TUM that included real-world testing in Munich.
After winning 25,000 euros in the November 2020 MobiData BW Hackathon competition to develop the software, the team is preparing to launch a subscription model. Planners will be able to use the interactive software to simulate changes to the infrastructure, explains the statement. For any given address, the tool can map out the entire area where residents are within a 15-minute radius on foot or by bicycle.
As the next step, the founders plan to populate the database with geodata for the entire German-speaking region, including Switzerland and Austria. “In general, there are no boundaries for this planning tool,” says Jehle in the statement.
