How to plan a 15-minute city? BME researchers will tell

The Department of Transport Technology and Transport Economics' research group on transport systems and mobility services has successfully applied - together with the cities of Szeged and Veszprém - to develop decision-support methods and IT applications for measures to shape urban transport systems and travel patterns.

The international call for proposals launched by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) was open to Hungarian participants in an international Driving Urban Transition (DUT) project. DUT projects aim to develop methods, applications and services to support the challenges of urban life and transport.

The realisation behind the project is that, as more and more cities recognise the need to prioritise active and sustainable modes of transport to create liveable neighbourhoods,

any intervention in the transport habits of city dwellers may encounter their resistance.

These processes therefore need to be carefully planned to avoid transport chaos and gain the support of city dwellers.

In the funded project called SUMODO - Developing Sustainable Urban Mobility in Suburbs, the BME research team is developing a software platform to support urban planners in designing and optimising 15-minute cities and to help travellers make decisions (the 15-minute city concept is that places that meet daily needs should be reached by sustainable transport modes in 15 minutes or less.)

The SUMODO platform supports the reduction of personal car use and consists of the following components:

- a behavioural model: frequency of visits to facilities and preferred transport modes;
- 15-minute composite index: a set of indicators to evaluate 15-minute cities;
- activity-based multimodal trip planner: methods to calculate the availability of services using active and sustainable transport modes;
- optimisation system: implementation of multi-objective optimisation algorithms in a geographical information system.

The combination of these tools enables urban planners to optimise physical and regulatory interventions to facilitate the creation of 15-minute cities at minimum economic and social cost. The project will run until the end of 2026, with a grant of HUF 71.8 million.

"In Hungary, housing estates are the closest to the idea of the 15-minute city, so the concept is not entirely new in the country. But in the 15 minutes, ideally, not only the basic services but also the workplaces of the people working in the neighbourhood are included," Dávid Földes, research fellow at the Department of Transport Technology and Transport Economics, told bme.hu.

Many experts and city leaders support this approach to urban development, but real estate developers do not necessarily follow this logic.

The SUMODO project essentially provides tools for assessment and proposal making - the latter mainly for transport.

"Part of the survey is also to survey public attitudes, but previous experience shows that people generally respond positively to these ideas," says Dávid Földes when asked.

He added that the project had been in the pipeline since last year, but the grant decision was only made at the end of the year, so funding has just been secured. The bulk of the work is still ahead though.

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