Bharath M. Palavalli, Harsha Krishna, Srijan Sil and Anirudh Thimmaiah
2019

Social Inclusion through Play, A New Methodology for Public Transport Planning in the Indian Context

Abstract

We present a methodology to address two critical gaps in transport planning, including marginalised communities in the transport planning process and creating plans that are responsive to their needs. This methodology makes use of gaming simulations whose results are then used in an agent-based simulation to present trade-offs between various plans and scenarios under consideration offering planners a low-cost risk-free context to plan for different scenarios. Women workers of garment factories in Bangalore depend on the public transport provider BMTC (Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation, the government-run public bus transportation system in Bangalore) for their mobility. We elaborate how transport needs of these women could be incorporated into the planning process using the gaming-simulation based approach. We then demonstrate how game-based planning tools such as ‘Transport Trilemma’ can be used as a participatory mechanism to elicit and model nuances in transport demand and generate multifarious context-specific planning scenarios based on diverse stakeholder engagement. Using this approach, we will show how the trade-offs framework can be used as an alternative to CBA for identifying and assessing both tangible and intangible benefits of public transport systems to increase participation and social inclusion in public transportation.

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