Roadmap for Future Mobility Development Supporting Bangkok Urban Living in 2030

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article was dedicated to a very interesting issue, which is  “Roadmap for Future Mobility Development Supporting Bangkok Urban Living in 2030”. The work discusses the problems of developing a roadmap guiding a company’s technology and innovation forfuture mobility by integrating the results from foresight and scenario analysis. In my opinion this subject is particularly important from the point of view of considering the behavior mobility in the process of balancing urban transport systems.

In general, the article is interesting for the reader, it is also prepared properly in terms of the content. I only have some comments that should be taken into account to make the article more valuable. The comments relate to individual substantive issues. Editing and linguistic issues are correct in my opinion. 

In section 2.3. where you refer to challenges and difficulties in smart city development, please indicate more problems related to the development of smart cities. These include, for example, counteracting the phenomenon of transport exclusion, difficulties with the willingness to share denials in the case of MaaS services, or, for example, an inadequate approach to managing various types of new mobility services and the presence of problems with the safety of users at the same time. Please expand the following research topics: transportation exclusion, data sharing problem and MaaS development difficulties, security issues and operational aspects of vehicle functioning. 

Below I am sending literature that you may find helpful and to which you can refer in the article:

1) Church et al. - Transport and social exclusion in London (...)       - in the case of transportation exclusion,

2) Becker, H. et al. - Assessing the welfare impacts of Shared Mobility and Mobility as a Service (MaaS).      - in the case of data sharing problem and MaaS development difficulties,

3)   Czech et al. The concept of rules and recommendations for riding shared and private e-scooters (...)      - in the case of safety and security issues
4) Turoń et al. - Operational aspects of electric vehicles from car-sharing systems        - in the case of fleet operational issues

In summary, indicate the limitations pointing to specific substantive limitations in the conducted research. Please also add specific further scientific plans of the authors in the subject matter. Please refer to the fact whether you plan to expand this research topic or it is already sufficiently exploited.  

After taking into account the amendments, the article will be better.

Good luck!

Author Response

see the attached 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This study describes a workshop where a scenario planning approach was adopted to the potential future development of Bangkok with implications for transportation in the focus. Participants were various stakeholders and a main outcome was the applications of insights to the business plan of a company involved in emerging transportation solutions in the Bangkok area.

While I find the aims, methods and outcomes of this work interesting, I believe some aspects of the scenario planning approach needs to be discussed in more detail.

Specifically, scenarios are presented in terms of potential outcomes along two high-level measures ("Livability" and "City development"). To me, it seems contradictory to the basis of scenario planning approach, where potential outcomes in lower-level variables are evaluated and scenarios are constructed from feasible combinations of such changes. In the description provided in the manuscript, it seems that an opposite approach was taken, where outcomes in terms of the two high-level measures were fixed, and participants gathered changes in lower-level variables that are consistent with these prescribed high-level outcomes.

I believe the authors should confirm if my above understanding is correct and (1) if yes, give more justification for taking this process; (2) if not, describe in more detail how the high-level outcomes were determined based on the factors considered by the participants in the workshop. In any case, I believe some more discussion should be given how the high-level outcomes are expected to realize from the interaction of lower-level factors considered in this research and the scenario planning exercise. Such discussion should include how the scenarios were decided on, what are the interactions that determine the outcomes, what factors were considered, etc.


Beside this, I have a set of questions / issues concerning more specific parts of the manuscript:

1. What is LINE? Should give a short (1-2 sentence) overview for readers not familiar with it (e.g. regions not from the region).
2. "Extra electricity generation" is mentioned as an important factor in multiple scenarios. What does it refer to? Aggregators owned and run by private individuals / businesses?
3. In line 574, the authors write: "The middle-income people do not have enough money to buy things, so they become renter". Do "things" in this sentence refer specifically to housing (so they rent instead of own housing), or does this apply to other goods as well? In the former case, "things" should be replaced with "housing" to be clear; in the latter case, should extend this and potentially give additional examples.
4. The phrase "for the particular company in this study" (and similar) is repeated in multiple places, e.g. line 586. It would improve the manuscript if the authors could give the name of the company; alternatively, they should clarify if it cannot be named (e.g. due to confidentiality reasons).
5. Fig. 11: it should be stated explicitly what the color codes mean.
6. Fig. 11: do these points represent outcomes or opportunities? It is unclear.
7. Fig. 12: I assume "self drive" here refers to the users of a shared mobility system driving (i.e. no autonomous vehicles). I suggest to use a different term so as to avoid confusion with "self-driving vehicles".
8. Fig. 12: Autonomous vehicles are shown as a "potential" technology from ~2025; how should this be interpreted?
9. Fig. 12: colors should be explained; which ones are internal projects and which are external?
10. More generally, it is contradictionary that the authors mention that the main target of the current study are urban planners, but it seems that in the study, the main target was a specific company. Maybe additional discussion could be added on how the results of such a study can be useful for a wider audience including urban planners. It could be discussed if there are potential conflicts, e.g. the opportunities identified for companies could be in conflict with the goals of urban planners (or more widely the government or the public), as identified from the scenarios discussed here.
11. Did the scenarios (or the authors) consider the potential impact of sea level rise? I believe this can be a serious issue for Bangkok (and many other large cities worldwide as well).


Furthermore, there are a set of small issues that should be checked by the authors:

line 115: "the Brownfield smart city project" -- should be "a brownfield", or does it refer to a specific project? In this case, should give a reference.
line 164: "turn their cities into a smart one" -- strange wording, should be "smart ones", or a different phrase?
refs 30-33 seem incomplete (is "Foresight" a journal? there should be volume and page number, and also a DOI if possible)
line 235: what is TRM?
line 279: missing comma ("access cultural")
line 326: "in which the project core team..."
line 327: "key literatures" -> better would be "key literature"
line 328: "as well as studies related to future..."
line 358, 361, 363: should be "a university professor" (and maybe give their affiliation), "A lead economist" (unless there is a specific title as "lead economist" in the Ministry of Finance) and "A lawyer from a leading international firm"
line 392: "Moreover, urban train..."
line 394: reference should be Fig. 6?
Fig. 6: I believe that extensions to the blue line were not finished until 2020; please check this and update the middle figure so that the date is consistent with the map shown there
line 508: "The place closed to the metro line" -> "Places closest to metro lines" (or "closer")
line 527: "Shared mobility is only affordable by middle income residents."
line 528: "Although traffic conditions are terrible"
line 563: "Middle income citizens need to live in suburbs / suburban areas while only the rich..."
line 637: "The contributions of this study are directed"

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Please see my revision note as attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The reviewed paper is well grounded in the literature from the fields and adds to (builds upon) existing solutions/methods to provide four different scenarios of urban development for the city of Bangkok, that can be further use by different stakeholders to base their further development/decisions on them.

The whole rationale and the process of developing the scenarios and underlying assumptions were thoroughly explained which allows interested readers to replicate the whole procedure for different cities. Authors also provided an example how those scenarios can be used by potential stakeholders (on the example of a particular company) to highlight its usability. However, as I gather as the main contributions are the developed scenarios the example (or a case study of the company developing a roadmap) should be clearly described as that.

The discussion part of the article is a drawback of the reviewed work as it only provides the conclusion of the achieved results and does not compare them in any way with other works. Either the current section 5 should be combined with section 6 as a conclusion leaving the paper without “discussion part” or both section 5 (discussion) and section 6 (conclusion) should be elaborated – as the section 6 in current form lacks such elements as identifying drawback of proposed solution, potential stakeholders, further direction of the research and/or further development of the proposed tool.

The title of figure 8 (line 492) should be referring to the struggling scenario.

Language is mostly adequate with some minor mistakes like in lines: 301, 407-409, 476, 508. Most of those will probably be dealt during the proofreading phase of the paper.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Please find my revision note as attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, the article has been significantly improved. Thank you very much for your intensive input. The article looks much better! The only thing that could be supplemented in the discussion is to refer to the ways to achieve the development of mobility by, among others, creating appropriate policies or educating, among others, about electromobility. They wrote about this approach, among others Turoń - When, What and How to Teach about Electric Mobility? An Innovative Teaching Concept for All Stages of Education: Lessons from Poland and Wangsness - Optimal policies for electromobility: Joint assessment of transport and electricity distribution costs in Norway.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I thank the authors for making the revisions; I think the manuscript is improved but requires some modifications before publication. In line with my original review, I believe there should be a more detailed description and justification given for the choice of key factors and the scenarios (i.e. Step 1 of the framework in Fig. 5), since this impacts the later stages of the analysis.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

All my comments have been taken into account and/or doubts have been clarified.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf