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Abstract
Infrastructure planners strive to ensure that infrastructure meets the needs of stakeholders in the short, medium and long-term. This is a challenging task because there is considerable uncertainty associated with future stakeholder needs, and the infrastructure built to meet these needs has a life-time spanning decades, if not centuries. Additionally, the planning of either new infrastructure or the modification of existing infrastructure usually requires years, or even decades, meaning that stakeholder needs often change during the planning process itself. Planners’ responsiveness, i.e., how quickly planners can adjust to changing stakeholder needs, depends on the planning processes in which the planners are embedded. The relationship between improving responsiveness (in this paper the time taken to increase rail capacity to acceptable levels) and its impact on stakeholder needs (in this paper the unmet demands for acceptable travel comfort) is investigated using three fictive but realistic infrastructure planning process alternatives. The planning decision enabling the capacity increase is the expansion of the tracks from single to double track between Uster and Aathal in the Canton of Zürich, Switzerland. The responsiveness and travel comfort are modelled given an uncertain population growth. The results show that the responsiveness of infrastructure planners (1) plays a role in the ability to meet stakeholder needs, (2) can be measured and (3) provides argument that in developing planning processes, considering planner responsiveness could be worthwhile. The specific example shows that being more responsive outperforms acting early in approximately 90% of the scenarios modelled.