Mobility plan Riga and Pieriga

(04-01-2010)

The Latvian Ministry of Transport awarded Witteveen+Bos the development of the mobility plan for Riga and Pieriga. The goal of the mobility plan is to determine a development vision and pertaining necessary actions in order to promote the unified development of traffic infrastructure.

The study area for the mobility plan comprises the Riga city and the surrounding Pieriga area, with a total size of 6,984 km² and 1.1 million inhabitants (approximately 50 % of the population of Latvia). Riga has a major seaport, an international airport and is a junction point of significant transport corridors. Several traffic and transport problems have arisen in Riga and Pieriga during the last decades due to increasing mobility and car ownership. Important bottlenecks are insufficient transport planning and management, traffic safety, a limited number of crossings over the Daugava River and a lack of facilities for cyclists and pedestrians.

Consortium

Witteveen+Bos is the leading party of the consultant team also consisting of NEA and Witteveen+Bos Latvia. Furthermore, several Latvian experts are involved in the project through the Witteveen+Bos office in Latvia. The total project budget is 700.000 Euro and the project must be completed in one year.

Traffic model

In the first stage of the project the current situation is analysed and objectives for the mobility plan are described. Furthermore, the traffic model has been updated and extended to identify bottlenecks and to model the impact of changes in infrastructure.

Variants

The next step is the development of variants for the mobility plan. These variants consist of measures for infrastructure development and for transport management and organization, addressing all transport modes (private car, public transport, non motorized transport). One preferred variant will be further elaborated. For this variant an action program with concrete measures for the first five years is developed in the last task.

Challenge

The development of a mobility plan, a strategic planning document, requires an integral approach and contributions of many disciplines varying from traffic management and planning, traffic modelling and public transport to marketing, transport economy and environmental assessment. In short it is a true Witteveen+Bos project and an interesting challenge.