Equitable and Sustainable Strategies for Managing Urban Traffic Demand and Enhancing Pedestrian Accessibility

Congestion pricing, whilst a potent tool for curbing vehicle demand in dense urban cores, faces political, practical, and equity barriers. Its implementation often exacerbates concerns around affordability, traffic displacement, and regressive impacts on lower-income groups. Critically, pricing alone fails to inherently create walkable environments; it prioritises vehicular flow over people. This thematic issue advances the discourse by examining integrated, technology-enhanced strategies that reduce car dependency whilst elevating pedestrian accessibility, safety, and equity.

We invite contributions exploring innovative traffic demand management (TDM) strategies beyond—or complementary to—congestion pricing, with emphasis on AI-driven solutions and their societal implications. Key areas include:

• AI-optimised traffic systems: Predictive analytics for dynamic kerbside management, parking pricing, and low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN) modelling.
• Equity-centred AI: Harnessing machine learning to identify mobility disparities, optimise public transit for underserved communities, and simulate equity impacts of TDM policies.
• Behavioural interventions: AI-powered personalised mobility nudges (e.g., journey planning, incentivising walking/transit) and data-driven policy design.
• Physical interventions: Scalable traffic-calming designs, LTNs, and parking reforms reclaiming street space for pedestrians.
• Systemic enablers: Flexible work policies, shared mobility integration, and transit-oriented development.

A core focus is the synergy between reduced traffic volumes/speeds and enhanced walkability. How can AI and TDM strategies collectively mitigate pedestrian-vehicle conflicts, improve air quality along walking corridors, and foster inclusive, healthy streetscapes? Crucially, we demand critical scrutiny of algorithmic bias, surveillance risks, and digital divides in tech-led solutions.

This thematic issue seeks empirical studies, theoretical critiques, and policy analyses examining how cities can leverage technology—ethically and equitably—to achieve dual goals: sustainable traffic reduction and universal pedestrian accessibility. Submissions must foreground justice, ensuring strategies benefit disabled, elderly, low-income, and marginalised communities whilst centring the human experience of urban mobility.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Urban Planning is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.