The construction of a pedestrian bridge over a highway, the closure of a post office or the opening of a supermarket: every change in infrastructure affects the mobility behavior of residents. Plan4Better-Co-founder Elias Pajares says:
"Planners are increasingly trying to promote active mobility, i.e., walking and cycling. Of course, this requires pedestrian and cycle paths. But the destinations people travel to every day must also be quickly accessible. Ideally, residents should be able to reach all important daily amenities within 15 minutes on foot or by bike."
Helpful tool for urban planners
Based on this idea, Pajares, together with Ulrike Jehle, who, like him, researches at the Chair of Urban Structure and Transport Planning at TUM, founded the startup Plan4Better With their company, the environmental engineers aim to bring a planning tool to market that contains a wealth of information such as population density, land use, topography, road layout, pedestrian and cycle path networks, and points of interest, such as supermarkets.
“With this tool, urban planners can develop scenarios and test their effects based on facts,”
explained Ulrike Jehle.
The prototype of the new software was developed in a research project at TUM. Part of the project, which has now been completed, also included a practical test: planners from Munich and the surrounding area were able to design different scenarios and directly observe the impact of individual decisions on pedestrian and bicycle traffic.
Jehle and Pajares are developing the software together with geoinformatician Majk Shkurti, the third member of the founding team. The three are supported by a small team of student interns and freelancers.
No limits for the planning tool
In the coming months, the team plans to launch a subscription model that provides access to geodata from German cities. Planners can then use the interactive software to simulate infrastructure changes and, for any given address, determine the area that residents can reach within 15 minutes on foot or by bike.
“With the help of these functions, you can quickly see where, for example, shopping facilities, schools or cycle paths are missing,”
explains Pajares.
In the next step, the founders plan to include geodata from the entire German-speaking region – including Switzerland and Austria – in their database.
“Basically, there are no limits to the planning tool,”
says Jehle.
