Virtual Reality & other future tools for Transport Planning

Talking about Transport Planning and the new tools that practitioners now have available, I must start with a definition of Transport Planning. It might seem obvious but over the years I have seen many misconceptions about what exactly is Transport Planning. One such misunderstanding is that Transport Planning equals Transport Modelling. This is quite common in Australia where transport infrastructure planning and delivery heavily relies on the “Predict and Provide” model. Other times it’s quite common to see definitions like the comic strip below:

My personal favourite definition of transport planning is the general definition of planning by Ernest R. Alexander professor of Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in his book Approaches to Planning first published in 1986. (Transport) “Planning is the deliberate social or organisational activity of developing an optimal strategy of future action to achieve a desired set of goals, for solving novel problems in complex contexts, and attended by the power and intention to commit resources and to act as necessary to implement the chosen strategy.”

Transport Planning is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative and participatory approach that is future oriented with a purpose to support decision making. It is the first step to transport infrastructure delivery. In summary, Transport Planning involves data collection and analysis, forecasting relevant indicators, designing of alternatives and assessing of the impacts each alternative will have.

persuasive storytelling about the future”

James A. Throgmorton, professor of Urban and Regional Planning in the University of Iowa describes planning as persuasive storytelling about the future.

“In this great future, you can't forget your past”.

As all Transport Futurists do, before talking about the future, I will discuss a lot the past. After all, as the great Bob Marley suggested, “In this great future you can't forget your past”.

Transport planning is an activity that goes back in history all the way to the first human settlements. The first advanced civilisations were distinguished among other things also by the way they planned and organised their transport systems. War and mass travel of armies was the first driver for organised transport planning. My ancient Roman colleagues planning for Via Appia or Via Egnatia had only just a few tools to perform their work. Over the years tools were developed to make transport planning more effective. From cartography and compass to surveying techniques there wasn’t much progress made until the 1970’s. The picture of large rooms full of transport planning professionals, planners, engineers, designers and drafters, developing drawings using paper, pencils, drawing triangles and protractor rulers was common in the 70’s.

And then the evolution changed pace drastically. The introduction of computers, computer aided design and plotters made a huge impact not only in the effectiveness of transport planning work but mainly in how this work was communicated to decision makers, stakeholders and the community.

Soon the true potential of these tools was realised. Why just stay with two dimensional black and white (or blueprint) drawings? 3D drawings were now being used, not only for architectural design but sometimes also for transport planning recommendations.

Visualisation is a term that existed from the 1880 but it really took off a hundred years later. Visualisation is defined as the process of representing data graphically using technologies and media and interacting with these representations to gain insight into the data.

And today, visualisation is helping us transport planners and engineers, enhance our work and make it much easier to communicate to peers, decision makers and the public.

The simplest of visualisation tools is the Photo Montage or also known in the digital world as Photoshopping. Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph. In transport planning a usual photomontaged image will have the proposed transport infrastructure included in a photograph of the site as is before the intervention. 

The game engine is the game changer

A game engine is a software framework designed for the creation and development of video games. In many cases game engines provide a suite of visual development tools in addition to reusable software components. The last few years, the game engine technology matured and became more user-friendly. The application of game engines has broadened in scope.

Game engines such as the Unreal Engine are now used by transport planning teams to present their work in a variety of forms and media. Still images developed from a Game Engine are easier to make and more realistic looking.

Game engines can also develop fly-throughs. A Fly-through is a visual sequence (computer animated simulation) of what would be seen while flying through a particular region.. Fly-throughs in transport planning are used most often during the early stages of large infrastructure projects to depict its basic elements such as location, alignment and impacts in the surrounding environment. 

Stakeholder and public consultation now have excellent tools that help people understand the transport planning options and designs. The technology allows them to view the designs in a 3D photorealistic way and record their comments and remarks on the design itself exactly at the point that they want to, whether this is for a DDA compliance issue of a ramp or a handrail that needs to be extended.

Virtual Reality is the next step in the digital tools that are now available for transport planners and traffic engineers.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Virtual Reality, as an artificial environment which is experienced through sensory stimuli (as sights and sounds) provided by a computer and in which one's actions partially determine what happens in the environment. The user wears an enclosed headset, that allows them to move virtually inside the model, without any reference back to the real world. Even former US president Barack Obama has narrated and “starred” in a new VR film about the White House and all of its historic rooms.

For transport planning, Virtual Reality (VR) models present a series of superior visualisation characteristics:  Understanding scale and the size of every element is not a problem anymore as the user experiences everything in a real world scale and every object at their actual size. Immersive is often the term used to describe the experience that VR offers its users. And this user experience – allowing people to navigate inside the models, is exactly where VR offers the biggest advantages. Moving through spaces, understanding scale and how the design will coexist with the built and natural environment is a novelty that 3D images and photomontages or even fly-throughs don't offer. VR applications can be used to simulate walking through a space or driving a car under different road conditions. When planning and designing for a cycleway, a VR application can be used to simulate cycling through the proposed infrastructure. 

What Transport and Main Roads staff had to say?

Trying to understand the true value of such a tool I organised a series of demonstrations of VR applications that Aurecon, my previous employer have developed over the previous years. The demonstrations took place from August 2016 till May 2017 and involved a number of QLD DTMR people from different areas, age groups, employment levels and professional backgrounds. After each demonstration, a survey link was send to the participants.

The survey response rate was phenomenal. Surveys that are distributed internally (that is to employees) generally receive a 30-40% response rate. The response rate of those distributed to external audiences (that is to customers) is lower, around 10-15%. This survey received a response rate of 67%.

This can be explained by the results of the first question that I asked. Overall, how satisfied are you with your experience using our new VR tool/application? I used the term extremely to describe the top limit of the available answers on purpose. Usually surveys avoid using such strong terms and prefer the use of the term “very”, to describe the highest level of satisfaction. The reason behind this is that most people avoid describing their feelings in such a strong way. My own personal experience made me use such a term, trying to understand if other people felt the same way as I did from this experience. An amazing 80% of the respondents said that were extremely satisfied with their Virtual Reality experience.

 The main purpose of this survey was to ask the question: How useful do you think such a tool/application could be in transport planning and traffic engineering work? Again, the results are very promising for the actual usefulness of this tool. Almost 95% of the respondents think that Virtual Reality is a very or extremely useful tool for transport planning.

Then I asked: How useful do you think such a tool/application could be in your own specific field of work? This time the results were more balanced. Still more than 60% believed that it is a very or extremely useful tool. There was also a 20% that thought that the tool is slightly or not at all useful in their line of work. Document control, Cost estimation, administration support, policy development was some of the fields of work that appeared in these answers.

In this survey, I have asked also a number of other questions relating to the

problems that VR could assist with, how likely it was for people to include VR in their next project and what are some of the benefits and also barriers that are associated with VR in transport planning and traffic engineering projects. Out of a series of very interesting findings and conclusions, the following quote stood out for me:

“Making people with limited understanding of drawings understand projects benefits and limits”

The final verdict for VR

The final verdict from the VR demonstrations and the survey is that Virtual Reality:

• Provides an exciting experience for project staff, stakeholders and public
• Is useful in many areas and tasks in transport planning
• Provides many benefits for projects and people involved

VR applications, depending on the project and the existing 3D design model, can be delivered at a very low cost.

Future tools

But Virtual Reality is not the only tool that traffic engineers and transport planners will use in the future. Augmented Reality (AR), a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view, is just making its first steps in the transport infrastructure planning and design industry. Already introduced to the wider public by the Pokemon Go game, AR and devices such as the Microsoft Hololens have the potential to make VR applications obsolete. Instead of looking at the design of the new train station at a special purpose room at the office, soon we will have the ability to look the same design in-situ.

And then there is Holograms, three-dimensional images formed by the interference of light beams from a laser or other coherent light source. In the Holograms case, we won’t even need a special headset to see the design of the new train station at its location. The new design will be projected in place by laser and other light sources. Such large-scale applications exist already with the example of the Buddha of Bamiyan, a 53 m high hologram presented in place where the original Buddha sculpture was destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. In a similar way, the set of traffic lights at a specific location could project the images of pedestrians crossing the street to alert their drivers of their red light or the car might project useful information on the road ahead to alert its driver. And of course, for all us Star Trek fans out there, we can’t wait until the day the Holodeck becomes a reality.

In an industry facing imminent disruption of the way we work and communicate our work to our clients, it is important to understand the new challenges that we need to successfully face. These challenges are at the same time great opportunities to improve the quality of our work and be more effective in solving not only the transport problems of today but also the problems that will arise with this new mobility.