Map portal on geodata on health, safety, and risk of accidents for spatial planning

Today´s spatial planning often focuses on densification, transformation, and mixing between housing and businesses.

In addition to the benefits of a living urban environment and efficient land use, it can mean that people are exposed to increased risks related to health and safety.

There is a great deal of complexity around considerations for health, safety, and the risk of accidents, flooding, and erosion. The information is also spread between different actors. Often, several different risks to health and safety also coincide in a single area.

This requires a weighted assessment of the overall problem picture, to assess whether an area can be considered suitable due to health and safety and risks.Analysis of issues related to risk is usually done in the detailed development stage. Each developer may pay for his or her own investigation, even if the development areas are almost identical.

Property developers are pressured to make quick decisions and with high land prices, they often run the construction project in parallel with the planning process. All to shorten times from land acquisition to revenue.

The developer takes a major project risk with this procedure.If geodata on health, safety, and accident risks had been available at an early stage, this project risk could be reduced.

Property developers and municipal officials know early on whether a proposed land use is possible in a particular location or when in-depth investigations are required to determine suitability.

With geodata of this kind, the time for processing and decision making could be shortened, the flow of information improved, and the predictability increased. However, the way the planning process has been conducted so far does not benefit this development.

The reuse of knowledge and experience is to some extent opposed by the business models of consulting engineers, which are mainly based on hourly sales. The possibilities for automation that open data enables are only used to a low extent.

What if all these geodata were made available in a map portal?The vision of the map portal is to make information that has a major impact on spatial planning freely available to all actors: With the help of a relevant and well-defined area - risks associated with the transport of dangerous goods - the project´s goal is to develop a pilot version of the portal.

Risk assessments of the transport of dangerous goods are well suited for automation as the risk level depends primarily on a few characteristics in the form of traffic flow, road type, speed limit which are published for the Swedish road and rail network among the Swedish Transport Administration´s open data.

Together with modern risk analysis technology, this data can be used to create an automated assessment of the impact of the transport route in a specific location.

The practice today is that the risk issue is investigated in all plans within 150 meters of any of the 8000 kilometers of transport routes for dangerous goods passing through an urban area.

Experience-wise, at least half of these investigations are carried out unnecessarily as they only show that intended use is possible on the site.

With an automated site-specific assessment, this work could have been avoided, saving both time and money in the planning process.

Our resources are being used more efficiently.The portal is built to be able to handle several different layers of information linked to spatial planning.

Data providers may be offered a platform to publish their information as well as a marketplace for the sale of services linked to refined geodata.

The potential for the map portal lies in the possibility of developing services where open data is refined to give stakeholders the opportunity for nuanced assessments.

These services form the basis of the digital transformation and changing business models from hourly sales to product sales. The project includes, together with partners from the private and public sectors, evaluating possible