Discovering Alternative Scenarios for Sustainable Urban Transportation

Abstract

Scenario techniques have already produced useful insights into creating the visions about the future of mobility as well as the potential implementation challenges associated with these visions. Unfortunately, scenario outcomes may appear to be an oversimplification of what is known as a complex issue in transportation, especially in determining how the future might unfold. The 'traditional way' of developing qualitative scenarios such as visioning activities often foreshadow the existence of a single best or a limited future option(s) for a given sector, community, or area. This is problematic as it views the target population as homogeneous, even though recipients may diverge widely in their value judgments over what a desirable future might be. As a result, without explicitly eliciting and negotiating this contested territory, scenario development runs the risk of creating opposition to sustainability futures rather than creating a common ground for different worldviews. In an effort to directly address the oversimplification that may be an artefact of the scenario planning process, we extend the scenarios developed in the scenario planning workshop on the Future of Urban Mobility conducted in Singapore to discover other 'missing' storylines that might be plausible but were not identified by the workshop participants. A scenario discovery method called the cross-impact balance (CIB) analysis will be employed to search for plausible alternative scenarios especially scenarios that were not discovered by the participants of the scenario planning workshop. Ultimately, we craft strategies that could be employed to trigger imaginative, transformative vision of the future, while navigating complex and potentially contradicting worldviews.

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J.H. Kurniawan – Discovering Alternative Scenarios
Version: Unedited Draft 1 Prepared on March 21, 2018
Discovering Alternative Scenarios for Sustainable Urban Transportation
Jude Herijadi Kurniawan, University of Waterloo
1
2
Paper Presented at 48th Annual Conference of the Urban Affairs Association,
4 – 7 April 2018, Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Scenario techniques have already produced useful insights into creating the visions
about the future of mobility as well as the potential implementation challenges
associated with these visions. Unfortunately, scenario outcomes may appear to be an
oversimplification of what is known as a complex issue in transportation, especially in
determining how the future might unfold. The ‘traditional way’ of developing qualitative
scenarios such as visioning activities often foreshadow the existence of a single best or
a limited future option(s) for a given sector, community, or area. This is problematic as
it views the target population as homogeneous, even though recipients may diverge
widely in their value judgments over what a desirable future might be. As a result,
without explicitly eliciting and negotiating this contested territory, scenario
development runs the risk of creating opposition to sustainability futures rather than
creating a common ground for different worldviews. In an effort to directly address the
oversimplification that may be an artefact of the scenario planning process, we extend
the scenarios developed in the scenario planning workshop on the Future of Urban
Mobility conducted in Singapore to discover other ‘missing’ storylines that might be
plausible but were not identified by the workshop participants. A scenario discovery
method called the cross-impact balance (CIB) analysis will be employed to search for
plausible alternative scenarios especially scenarios that were not discovered by the
participants of the scenario planning workshop. Ultimately, we craft strategies that
could be employed to trigger imaginative, transformative vision of the future, while
navigating complex and potentially contradicting worldviews.
1. Introduction: Scenario biases
As urban areas continue to grow and develop rapidly, there is a growing demand for the
use of scenario techniques in urban transportation planning. Scenario techniques have already
produced useful insights into creating visions of the future urban mobility as well as the potential
implementation challenges associated with these visions. Studies have shown that such visions
1
Jude H. Kurniawan is a doctoral candidate at the University of Waterloo, Department of Geography and
Environmental Management and holds Energy Council of Canada’s Energy Policy Research Fellowship. Contact
address: Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo. 200 University Ave W,
Waterloo ON, Canada N2L 3G1. Email: hkurniawan@uwaterloo.ca
2
This paper is part of a work-in-progress manuscript co-authored by Kurniawan J.H., Luederitz C., Kundurpi A.,
Burch S., Schweizer V.J. (University of Waterloo) and Cheah L. (Singapore University of Technology and Design)

J.H. Kurniawan – Discovering Alternative Scenarios
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expressed in scenarios are important elements for designing sustainable urban transport (see e.g.,
Moriarty and Honnery, 2008; Shiftan et al., 2003; Spickermann et al., 2014). Despite the credible
track record, scenarios may appear to be an oversimplification of what is known as a complex
issue in transportation, especially in determining how the future might unfold.
The visions of sustainable urban transport do not seem to be projected in a consistent
manner by different scenario studies. While scenarios are illustrating the same topic or issue (e.g.
future of urban transportation), different scenarios tend to communicate different meanings about
what sustainable urban transport could or would be. In some cases, these studies might emphasize
active mobility as the key element or driver of change for sustainable urban transport (Tight et al.,
2011) for example. Yet, such notion may also underplay futures that revolve around the
advancement of transport technologies (Fishman, 2012), which many believes that it is now
inevitable (Kurniawan et al., 2018).
The reason for this, for the most part, is the ‘traditional way’ of developing qualitative
scenarios such as visioning activities which often foreshadows the existence of a single best or a
limited future options for a given sector, community, or area. Typically, scenario outcomes are
constrained by the consensus process in a scenario planning workshop, where the scenario
planning workshop participants, who are mostly the stakeholders, would arrive at a consensus on
which scenarios they deem plausible and desirable. However, this could be problematic because
an individual or a group who has a dominating voice (or epistemic power) could exert their agenda
on other participants. That means the more powerful group or individuals may influence what
scenarios to be insinuated. Therefore, scenario outcomes may not be a representation of a common
vision but rather the vision that is subjected to political negotiations by a certain group of
individuals.
Nevertheless, the produced scenarios are often oversimplified and treated as the desired
future of the target populations. Clearly, scenario planning views the target population as
homogeneous, even though scenario users may diverge widely in their value judgments over what
a desirable future might be. In the real world, populations are not homogenous and not entirely
consensual in which individuals may have different concerns about what their future would be.
Hence, the question remains who is representing who in the scenario planning workshop?
Obviously, when we select a different group of participants for the same workshop, the scenarios
produced could potentially be different. Because different groups of participants may visualize
futures differently, there is no common ground for understanding the transformative vision of the
futures. These visions may differ much and could potentially be contradicting. As a result, without
explicitly eliciting and negotiating this contested territory, scenario development runs the risk of
creating oppositions to sustainability futures rather than creating a common ground for different
worldviews.
2. Proposed method for discovering alternative scenarios
In an effort to directly address the oversimplification that may be an artefact of the scenario
planning process, we extend the scenarios developed in the scenario planning workshop on the
Future of Urban Mobility conducted in Singapore to discover other ‘missing’ storylines that might

J.H. Kurniawan – Discovering Alternative Scenarios
Version: Unedited Draft 3 Prepared on March 21, 2018
be plausible but were not identified by the workshop participants. The scenario planning workshop
is part of foresight research on the future of urban transport conducted by the Singapore University
of Technology and Design (SUTD) (Zahraei et al., 2016). This study has already produced insights
into the process of creating visions about the future of mobility and the potential implementations
challenges associated with these visions
3
. Readers who are interested scenario development
process, the detail description of the scenario planning workshop was documented by Kurniawan
(2016) and can be downloaded from a public repository.
This study employs a scenario discovery method called the cross-impact balance (CIB)
analysis (Weimer-Jehle, 2006) to search for plausible alternative scenarios especially scenarios
that eluded the participants of the scenario planning workshop. Scenarios produced by CIB have a
combinatorial structure involving combinations of scenario driver’s end-states that are self-
reinforcing; thus, these scenarios are internally consistent. Internally consistent scenarios, in this
case, are plausible futures because the self-reinforcing mechanism embedded in the scenarios will
continue to operate perpetually and thus making this specific configuration to be highly likely the
future outcome.
Performing CIB analysis starts with constructing a cross-impact (CI) matrix. A technique
for reconstructing a CI matrix by analyzing the verbal discourse has been previously employed by
Schweizer & Kriegler (2012). Topics that were discussed by workshop participants could provide
much richer information than the scenario outcome(s) alone. Hence, there could be the alternative
outcomes when we investigate deeper into the potential scenario drivers and understand how these
drivers would interact. Using a CI matrix, we map these influences or interactions among scenario
drivers. We employ qualitative analysis to sift out participants’ comments that describe
interactions between two or more scenario drivers. For example, a comment on the possibility of
reduced travel demands due to the socially acceptable telecommuting practice could be flagged
for analysis. This condition may or may not be reflected in the scenario outcome, but it was
certainly found embedded in the qualitative discourse. From the qualitative discussion recorded
for these two events, we extract the underlying themes that would be incorporated as the scenario
drivers and future end-states for building cross-impact matrices. The matrix captures values of
interactions in the matrix cells. For instance, when a statement implying ‘telecommuting reduces
future travel demands’ frequently appears in the discussion, it is inferred that ‘telecommuting’ is
strongly influencing ‘future travel demands.' This study will use this sort of rules to inform the
judgments on the magnitude of the interactions between drivers. A meta-data of the verbal
discussion for one of the break-out sessions was used for constructing a cross-impact matrix as
shown in Figure 1.
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Detail information about the research project can be found on this website: https://mobility.sutd.edu.sg/foresight/

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Figure 1 Cross-impact matrix populated with judgment scores derived from qualitative analysis of the recording of the discussion at the scenario planning workshop
Descriptors/
States
State 1 State 2 State 3 State 4 State 1 State 2 State 3 State 4 State 1 State 2 State 3 State 4 State 1 State 2 State 3 State 1 State 2 State 3
Descriptor 1 E-Commerce
State 1 Pre-emptive Purchase 0 0 0 0 -2 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 -1
State 2 E-Social Shopping 0 0 0 0 -3 0 3 0 0 0 0 3 0 -3
State 3 Retail Malls Makeover 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 -2 0 0 0 0 0 0
State 4 Need for Touchy Feely 0 0 0 0 3 0 -1 -2 0 0 0 -3 0 3
Descriptor 2 Innovation Capacity
State 1 Single Ecosystem -3 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
State 2 Collaboration 1 1 -1 -1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 -3
State 3 Export Innovation 0 0 -1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
State 4 First Adopter 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Descriptor 3 Multi-zones District
State 1 Organic Evolution 0 0 -1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -3 0 3
State 2 Two-layer City 2 0 -2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
State 3 Freight Nation 3 1 -1 -3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 -2
State 4 Time-division Multiplex 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -2 1 1
Descriptor 4 Personal Mobility Device
State 1 First and Last Mile -3 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 -3 -1 1 3 0 0 0
State 2 PMD-Everything 1 0 -3 2 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 -3 0 0 0
State 3 Walking Nation -3 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 2 2 -3 -1 0 0 0
Descriptor 5 Virtual Travel
State 1 Virtual Everything 3 1 -1 -3 1 1 1 -3 -3 1 1 1 -1 0 1
State 2 Access-as-a-service 1 1 -1 -1 0 1 0 -1 1 0 0 -1 1 -2 1
State 3 Virtual-not-reality -3 -1 1 3 -1 -1 -1 3 3 0 0 -3 1 1 -2
Personal Mobility Device
Descriptor 4
Descriptor 5
Virtual Travel
Descriptor 1
E-Commerce
Descriptor 2
Innovation Capacity
Descriptor 3
Multi-zones District

J.H. Kurniawan – Discovering Alternative Scenarios
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Table A: List of descriptors and states for the Singapore’s Future of Urban Mobility 2040 that will be used to
construct the cross-impact matrix
S/N Descriptors States Narratives
1 E-Commerce Pre-emptive Purchase Before one would think about buying anything, retailers (e.g. Amazon)
have already sent the products and goods you intended to buy. This is
made possible by an intelligent profiling algorithm that could predict
individual’s purchase intentions accurately.
E-Social Shopping Shopping malls are no longer physically present; malls now exist on the
Internet. Unlike the traditional online shopping, the E-Social Shopping
is a platform for users to socialize and shop for products with their
friends and loved ones
Retail Malls Makeover The concept of shops is redefined where shops are now like a vending
machine. People place their order and pay, and their purchase will be
delivered to their home at the backend. As the shops are no longer
occupies much floor space, retail malls become a place for social
activities.
Need for Touchy Feely Society demands physical social interactions and clings on to the
traditional way of shopping where physical interactions with others are
still prevalent.
2 Innovative Capacity Single Ecosystem Innovations emerge from within the country without much assistance
from research centres overseas. The government supports the growth of
innovation and encourages the adoption of locally developed
technologies.
Collaboration Innovation capacity increases due to collaborations in research and
development among satellite ‘silicon valleys’ (or innovation hubs).
Singapore has also grown to be one of the innovation hubs eventually.
Export Innovation Innovations are treated as ‘tradeable commodities.' Singapore has
developed the ability to import innovations from overseas, add value and
repackage as ‘new’ innovations and export them to the world market.
First Adopter Similar to the current situation, the Singapore government will always
be the first in the world to embrace and implement various innovations.
Innovation capacity increases due to spillover effects.
3 Multi-zones District Organic Evolution Urban developments are unplanned and left to evolve on their own
depending on demands.
Two-layer City Purposeful urban planning where one layer (e.g. underground)
accommodates a type of transport mode and another layer (e.g.
aboveground) accommodates a different transport mode.
Freight Nation Purposeful urban planning with the emphasis on the efficient movement
of freight due to fewer individuals’ travel demands (i.e. re-purpose the
current infrastructure with minimum modification).
Time-division
Multiplex
No technical solutions are feasible, and the city has resorted to restricting
people’s mobility. to 18 hours a day and therefore leaving 6 hours a day
for movement of goods.
4 Personal Mobility
Device
First and Last Mile All public transport commuters will have PMD for the first and last mile.
PMD-Everything Hi-tech PMD like a travel pod owned by individuals. The pods and the
available infrastructures make travelling anywhere in the city possible.
Walking Nation Walking as the primary mode of transport is culturized into the society.
5 Virtual travel Virtual Everything Most of the physical travel has been made unnecessary because virtual
reality connects everyone for study, work, and play.
Access-as-a-service Virtual travel is a service that can be accessed by certain privileged
groups
Virtual-not-reality In contrast to ‘Virtual Everything,' the virtual reality technology fails to
manifest into social norms.

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Following the convention of CIB analysis, scenario drivers or elements are called
‘descriptors’ (Weimer-Jehle, 2006). The list of descriptors and their corresponding future states
presented on the matrix are explained in Table A. Judgments inferring the interactions among
states, which were distilled from the participants’ discussions, allow for CIB analysis that
subsequently produces five internally consistent scenarios. The consistent scenarios were
discovered using ScenarioWizard program (Weimer-Jehle, 2016). The result shows five consistent
scenarios were found to be different from the two scenarios identified by the participants during
the workshop as shown in Table B.
Table B: Scenario configurations produced by workshop participants in the Singapore’s Future of Urban Mobility
2040 and the corresponding CIB analysis
Descriptors/States
Scenario
#
E-commerce Innovative
Capacity
Multi-zones
District
PMD Virtual Travel
Scenarios produced by workshop participants:
Telephone Pre-emptive Purchase Export Innovation Organic Evolution PMD-Everything Access-as-a-service
Coconut
Tree
Retail Mall Makeover Single Ecosystem Two-Layer City Walking Nation Access-as-a-service
Scenarios produced by CIB analysis:
#1 E-Social Shopping Single Ecosystem Two-Layer City Walking Nation Virtual Everything
#2 Pre-emptive Purchase Collaboration Two-Layer City Walking Nation Virtual Everything
#3 Pre-emptive Purchase Export Innovation Two-Layer City Walking Nation Virtual Everything
#4 Need for Touchy Feely First adopter Organic Evolution First and Last Mile Virtual-not-reality
#5 Need for Touchy Feely First adopter Organic Evolution PMD-Everything Virtual-not-reality
3. Discussions
When subjecting the matrix to a CIB analysis (and also Monte Carlo simulations),
alternative scenarios discovered in this research were found to be more plausible than those
scenarios produced in the workshops. This is an interesting point in sustainable urban transport
research because there could be other interesting scenarios worth pursuing. For instance, how
useful would these alternative scenarios be in the field of sustainable transport research? Most of
the workshop participants in Singapore have an engineering background, which may explain why
scenarios produced in the scenario planning workshop tend to be “technological-driven” scenarios.
However, our study produces not only technological driven scenarios but also more “socially-
inclined” scenarios.
Based on their similar end-states, the discovered scenarios can be grouped into two
scenario sets. First, scenario #1, #2, and #3 portray three dominant end-states, Two-layer City,
Walking Nation, and Virtual Everything; and one somewhat dominant end-state, Pre-emptive
Purchase. The end-states indicate that this scenario set expresses many aspects of technology
infiltration in our daily lives. Unlike the first scenario set which tends to be technological-driven,
the second scenario set is socially-inclined. The second group of scenarios comprises of scenario
#4 and #5, which appears to be telling an opposing story in that societies tend to resist technological
changes. Evidently, the dominant end-states of the group two scenario set points to business-as-
usual situations such as there is no virtual reality and people still values social interactions in
physical form.

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Two descriptors distinguish the scenario sets apart; these are the concept of multi-zones
district and virtual travel. While transport planners might have been dealing with planning
activities related to multi-zones district, they may be less familiar with the concept of virtual travel
as it does not relate to planning per se, but rather the socio-technical transition. The rise of virtual
reality technology will promote travel in the virtual space that could potentially change the future
of urban mobility (Kurniawan et al., 2018). With virtual travel, the urban mobility may not be like
anything we experience today.
Another important aspect is the concept of the two-layer city. The two-layer indicates
physical segregation of mobility services where the aboveground is often dedicated as social space
while the underground houses the transport network—the ‘artery’ of the city. The concept of two-
layer city pushes the boundary of imagination in that it is then imperative for us to change our
mindset to accept that the traditional way of providing transport and mobility services would no
longer be relevant in the future. For instance, the configuration of the two-layer city and virtual
travel imply the slightest hint in that continuing to build roads would be pointless in the future and
a waste of resources. In fact, we should proactively reduce the road density on the aboveground
layer of the future cities when we anticipate this specific scenario set as the common vision.
The scenarios discovered by CIB analysis have the configurations that are plausible, but
they are not discovered by the workshop participants. Our findings also suggest that the social
acceptance of virtual travel and any unconventional mode of transport may prove to be one of the
defining key elements that shape the urban mobility in the future—a key element that might be
overlooked by the traditional scenario planning process.
4. Conclusions
In sum, we present a strategy that could be employed to trigger imaginative, transformative
vision of the future, while navigating complex and potentially contradicting worldviews. On the
broader sustainability context, this paper raises questions if studies conducted at a specific level
(national or municipal) and with a specific subset of society would be adequate for addressing the
future of transport and mobility issues that have manifested across multi-level and multi-actor
governance. Therefore, scenario development process should not be defined by a niche sectoral
perspective, because in doing so the scenario outcomes tend to project a narrower view of risk
perception (Schweizer and Kurniawan, 2016). This is undesirable as it pays to be prudent and not
to leave any stones unturned for identifying potential risks in any sectors, scales and levels that
would impede sustainability transitions.
Acknowledgement
The initial idea of the paper was first instilled by Vanessa Schweizer (Jude’s Ph.D. advisor)
in 2016, which Jude had subsequently developed into a full research. Jude’s work is supported by
a fellowship from Energy Council of Canada and Canada’s Natural Science and Engineering
Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant. University of Waterloo GSPA also provided travel
grant for Jude to present this paper at the 48th Annual Conference of the Urban Affairs Association
in Toronto. Jude also would like to thank SUTD and particularly Lynette Cheah for hosting him

J.H. Kurniawan – Discovering Alternative Scenarios
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during his stay in Singapore from January to April 2016 to work on the research project, Foresight
Study on the Future of Urban Mobility.
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