10.03.2026

What Is Transport Planning Software? A Guide for Cities and Authorities

As cities grow and mobility demands evolve, transport planning software has become an essential tool for authorities, urban planners, and researchers. But what exactly does it do — and what should you look for when evaluating solutions?

What Transport Planning Software Does

At its core, transport planning software enables planners to model how people move through a city, test the effect of infrastructure changes or new mobility services before they are implemented, and produce evidence-based recommendations for Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs).

Modern platforms go far beyond static traffic models. They integrate:

• Land-use and transport demand models — linking where people live, work, and travel
• Activity-based demand models — capturing daily travel patterns and trip chains at the individual level
• Traffic simulation — modelling road networks, public transport, and new mobility services
• Environmental and emissions assessment — quantifying CO₂ and air quality impacts of different scenarios

The Key Challenge: Fragmented Tools

One of the biggest problems cities face is that these capabilities are spread across incompatible tools. Land-use models, demand models, and traffic simulators are developed by different vendors, use different data formats, and require specialists in each. Connecting them is manual, error-prone, and expensive.

The traditional approach forces transport agencies to either:

• Use a single vendor's ecosystem (PTV, Aimsun) and accept its limitations, or
• Pay to train staff across multiple tools and manually integrate outputs

A New Generation of Integrated Platforms

This is the problem that HarmonyMS was designed to solve. Developed through the EU H2020-funded HARMONY project, it is a software-agnostic, modular platform that allows transport modellers to connect existing models — including commercial tools like PTV VISUM and Aimsun — through standardized adaptors.

Rather than replacing the models planners already rely on, HarmonyMS provides a common framework for linking them, managing input-output data flows, and evaluating scenarios across strategic, tactical, and operational planning levels.

What HarmonyMS Has Been Applied To

HarmonyMS has already been deployed in real-world planning processes across Europe, including:

• Rotterdam, Netherlands — strategic transport and land-use planning
• Oxfordshire, UK — sustainable mobility planning and scenario testing
• Turin, Italy — multimodal demand and emissions modelling
• Athens, Greece — urban mobility intervention assessment
• Larnaca and Heraklion — emerging deployments under EU projects

What to Look for in Transport Planning Software

When evaluating platforms for your authority or consultancy, consider:

• Model agnosticism — can it connect to models you already use?
• Activity-based demand modelling — does it capture individual travel behaviour, not just aggregate flows?
• Multimodal coverage — does it handle walking, cycling, public transport, and new mobility services (e-scooters, shared cars, AVs)?
• Scenario management — can you easily define, compare, and communicate the results of different policy options?
• Data integration — what input data formats does it support, and how does it connect to travel survey data?

The Role of Travel Data in Transport Planning

Transport models are only as good as the data that feeds them. Origin-destination matrices, modal split data, and activity patterns all need to come from somewhere — typically a combination of household travel surveys, GPS traces, and administrative data.

This is where tools like MobyApp come in: a smartphone-based travel survey platform that automates the collection of multi-day travel and activity diaries, feeding high-quality behavioural data directly into planning models.

Looking Ahead: The €25 Billion Urban Mobility Market

By 2035, the global demand for urban mobility platforms is projected to reach approximately $25 billion, with Europe as the largest regional market. The European Commission's push for cities to adopt Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) is a key driver — and it creates a direct need for integrated, evidence-based transport planning software.

MobyX is at the intersection of this trend: developing the tools that help cities collect the data they need, model the outcomes of their plans, and make better decisions for their residents.

Get in touch to learn more about how HarmonyMS and MobyApp support transport planning in practice.