In recent years, policymakers of urban agglomerations in various regions of the world have been striving to reduce environmental pollution from harmful exhaust and noise emissions. Restrictions on conventional vehicles entering the inner city are being introduced and the introduction of low-emission measures, including electric ones, is being promoted. This paper presents a method for scenario analysis applied to study the reduction of exhaust emissions by introducing electric vehicles in a selected city. The original scenario analyses relating to real problems faced by contemporary metropolitan areas are based on the VISUM tool (PTV Headquarters for Europe: PTV Planung Transport Verkehr AG, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany). For the case study, the transport model of the city of Bielsko-Biala (Poland) was used to conduct experiments with different forms of participation of electric vehicles on the one hand and traffic restrictions for high emission vehicles on the other hand. Scenario analyses were conducted for various constraint options including inbound, outbound, and through traffic. Travel time for specific transport relations and the volume of harmful emissions were used as criteria for evaluating scenarios of limited accessibility to city zones for selected types of vehicles. The comparative analyses carried out showed that the introduction of electric vehicles in the inner city resulted in a significant reduction in the emission of harmful exhaust compounds and, consequently, in an increase in the area of clean air in the city. The case study and its results provide some valuable insights and may guide decision-makers in their actions to introduce both driving ban restrictions for high-emission vehicles and incentives for the use of electric vehicles for city residents.

The development of sustainable transport is a priority in cities. It should aim to increase the number of trips made by public transport while minimizing social costs and the negative impact on the environment. The intensive development of cities from industrial to service-oriented and the phenomenon of suburbanization require changes in public transport services. However, often, operators do not change existing lines and stops or timetables justifying it with passenger habits. This approach may cause a discrepancy between the accessibility of public transport services and the demand for these services. Therefore, planning and improving the public transport system should be based on careful analyses. There are various approaches to this problem. The article presents a method to assess accessibility of public transport services using spatial and temporal analysis. The proposed method is based on dividing the area into basic fields and then, using appropriately selected measures, each field is assessed in terms of both the current level of accessibility of public transport services and the potential transport demand. A comparative analysis with the use of spatial tools indicates the degree of matching of these values and enables the identification of areas (basic fields) in which improvement of public transport services is required. For the proposed method, a case study was carried out for the city of Czeladź, located in Metropolis GZM in the southern part of Poland. The method can support decision making to improve the current public transport system.

The growing awareness of environmental issues, climate policies, and rapidly developing technologies is contributing to the increasing number of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) around the world. A key requirement for their widespread implementation is providing a charging infrastructure that allows users to operate these vehicles comfortably. Lack of access to charging stations can be a major barrier to the development of electromobility in a given area. Therefore, each additional charging infrastructure can support a change in the structure of the vehicle fleet. One of the key challenges facing this transformation is the selection of suitable locations for charging stations. It is necessary to ensure that they are uniformly distributed so that range anxiety for EV users is reduced and equal access to charging infrastructure is provided to all residents. One of the most important stakeholders in this market is local authorities. Therefore, the objective of this research was to develop a method of determining optimal locations for electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) from the perspective of local authorities that also takes into account equal access to the charging infrastructure for all residents, which seems to be a unique approach to this problem. We used commonly available spatial data as input to enable the method to be applied on a larger scale and over an urban area. We carried out our research using a case study: the city of Gliwice in Poland. The city area was divided into hexagonal basic fields, for which potentials for locations of new charging stations were calculated. The analysis was carried out using the geographic information system (GIS) QGIS (ver. 3.34).

The paper presents a method of the assessment of spatial integration of bike-sharing stations in urban agglomerations based on GIS tools for analyses. The method uses four sub-models: system of bike-sharing stations, road and street network, demand for bike-sharing ridership, bike-sharing ridership routing, and value matrix of spatial integration measures. The presented method allows the identification of different categories of segments of the road and street network used for bike travels and enables the identification of the set of segments that should be upgraded into bike-friendly infrastructure offering bike lanes or cycle paths in order to ensure the appropriate level of spatial integration of bike-sharing stations. The possibility of the application of the method has been studied on the example of the existing bike-sharing system in Katowice, a city in southern Poland. The research presented in the paper has been conducted based on data on bike rentals and bike trips from eight months of 2018. Selected results of the spatial integration assessment of bike-sharing stations, which may be useful for making investment decisions in the bike-sharing system development, are presented.

This article presents research results on a multi-aspect assessment of delivery planning in the urban transport network. The distribution of goods and the operation of a network of small services in urban agglomerations is a very important decision-making problem. This is due, on one hand, to the dense development of urban areas and, on the other hand, to the increasing restrictions on minimizing harmful exhaust gases emitted by cars. Hence, many researchers are looking for decision support methods that take into account many partial points of view in the field of transport services for small service companies located in urban areas. The authors present a method of multi-criteria decision support in the planning of urban supplies, taking into account the minimization of emissions of harmful compounds (carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter), the cost, time, and amount of ecosystem exposure to these compounds. An important aspect of this research was to identify partial criteria of the decision support methodology and the definition of decision variants. The partial criteria included cost, time, and the amount of exposure of the ecosystem to harmful compounds. The Saaty method was used to determine the weights of the criteria.