Reducing Car Use on Texel
Integrative Executive Summary
Tourism can be a great source of revenue for the economy, especially for small islands. However, it can also lead to unfortunate situations if, for example, tourists are not properly managed in the available space. This is the case for Texel, in the North-Holland province of the Netherlands. Here, tourists often vastly outnumber the local population, bringing a great stream of revenue to the local economy. However, as most tourists travel to and around the island by private car, it results in traffic congestion, making the situation frustrating for both locals and tourists, as well as unsustainable for the ecosystems of the island. As of now, there exist different obstacles which discourage tourists from using more sustainable modes of transport.
This paper, commissioned by Texlabs, an organisation thatstrives to connect people with each other to create networks to contribute to a more sustainable Texel and future, explores different
possible solutions to the problem of tourism-based car traffic on Texel. This research has been conducted separately in policy and infrastructure fields, which are then integrated to answer the research question: What infrastructural and policy interventions can improve mobility on Texel by reducing the car usage of tourists on the island to make it more sustainable?
To answer this question, three types of data were used: scientific literature, grey literature and interviews conducted with stakeholders involved in the tourism and transport sectors on Texel.
Stakeholders were categorized into four groups: private actors, users, public actors, and knowledge institutes. In the policy and infrastructure sub-chapters, relevant literature is combined with information derived from stakeholders. The advice for Texel derived from this is analysed using a SWOT analysis, which allows for spotting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for introducing new measures in the current situation on the island. The integrative advice is analysed through a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), involving an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) analysis, based on nine criteria relevant for mobility on Texel. The criteria used are; Accessibility, Cost, Sustainability, Speed, Capacity, Integration, Reliability, Comfort and Safety.
The result of this research is given in two pieces of advice, which integrate the policy and infrastructure sector recommendation. It is to be noted that the collaboration between the policy and infrastructure sectors is key given their complementarity in the traffic and tourism issues. In both subchapters, the advice aims to encourage tourists to reduce the use of their cars by making other alternatives more accessible and appealing. This leads to the first advice; the implementation of a Texel Access Pass. This is an all-in-one service that would make alternative mobility more accessible to tourists. It would include a return ticket for the TESO ferry, unlimited access to public transport on Texel, including bicycle rental. On the other hand, the second advice focuses more on reducing car use by both infrastructural means and municipal policies to encourage other modes of transport, while also discouraging car usage by making private vehicles less convenient. Such measures include separate biking, walking, and car lanes to improve safety for bikers and pedestrians, reducing the availability of parking spaces, and improving the overall public transport capillarity.