Simulation of a full-scale implementation of Superblocks in Vienna

Superblocks have been introduced in the city of Barcelona as a traffic management and urban planning concept to enhance public health and reduce traffic in dense urban neighborhoods. The general idea of prioritizing active mobility modes and diminishing motorists and parking space has meanwhile been adopted by many other cities to various city grid structures. The impact on mode choice behavior and traffic volumes has been difficult to measure as the pilot projects are rather small interventions and before-after-analyses were rarely conducted. In this article, we therefore use an agent-based mesososcopic traffic simulation (MATSim) to model different configurations and numbers of Superblocks. In the case study for the city of Vienna 61 scenarios with up to 46 Superblocks are simulated. The results show that the number of car trips in the affected Superblocks decrease linearly by around 100 car trips per day and Superblock.