PB Consult's urban planning expertise incorporated into handout for local authorities

The increasing scarcity of public space in cities and urban centres poses major challenges for municipal planners, which must be implemented sensibly in the field of urban and transport planning.

Against this backdrop, the ‘ILS - Institut für Landes- und Stadtentwicklungsforschung gGmbH’ from Dortmund carried out the project ‘Good solutions for stationary traffic’ (2021-2023) in cooperation with ministries in North Rhine-Westphalia. This research project included interviews with experts from the sector. A particular focus was on neighbourhood car parks and parking management concepts in municipalities.

We are proud that our colleague Jens Lauterbach (Head of Mobility Management, Transport Planning & Traffic Engineering) was able to participate as an expert. You can read numerous statements from him in the publicly accessible handout. One of the most striking is presented here as an example:

‘I know it's a very emotional topic, it's going to be difficult. ... But if you look at it from the [aspect of] traffic turnaround: we have to do something, apart from the ecological problem... it's primarily a space problem, a city is finite. ... Car parks are a major traffic control instrument. You can also see in neighbouring cities like Vienna how it works and what effects it has. In Paris, you take away entire streets [from car traffic] and the traffic disappears. It doesn't appear somewhere else, it simply disappears. These are effects that simply have to be tackled, regardless of how Germans feel about their cars.’

You can read more statements from our colleague and many other insights from our colleagues in the handout here: https://www.ils-forschung.de/wissenstransfer/ils-publikationen/ils-working-paper/?id=766

In addition to Jens Lauterbach, other representatives of well-known organisations from the mobility and planning sector were involved in the project - to name just a few: Zukunftsnetz Mobilität NRW, HafenCity University Hamburg, Planersocietät, VCD, City of Dortmund, City of Düsseldorf, City of Cologne, City of Münster, Technische Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe and others.