Computer simulation models have been a staple of transportation planning for years, predicting traffic demand to help government agencies establish priorities for improving the transportation system. Generally these models don't take into account the complexities of urban transportation decisions, the interaction between where people live and work, and how we travel to work and other destinations. As a result they tend to be rather rudimentary tools for road network planning. In most cases the models develop travel patterns from an assumed distribution of land uses: land use decisions are an input to the model rather than part of the model process itself.
The University of Toronto is now collaborating with other Canadian universities in the development of an Integrated Land Use, Transportation, Environment Modeling System (ILUTE). This model looks at the behavioural aspects of land development, location choice, auto ownership and activity/travel - and the interaction between these components. For example, land use evolves in response to location needs of households and firms, and people relocate their homes and/or jobs at least partially in response to accessibility factors. In modelling travel, ILUTE adopts an explicit activity-based approach, in which travel derives from the need to participate in activities, and the spatial/temporal pattern of travel is the dynamic outcome of each person's activity scheduling/re-scheduling process.
This approach should help improve the sustainability of communities by providing a planning tool that is better tuned to travel needs and current policy requirements. The model developers intend to make this available for municipalities to assist with transportation planning, but there is a lot of work still to be done.
Footnote: There are a number of software models that integrate land use and transportation planning, but most of them, like the ILUTE model, are developed in an academic environment and are not widely used. An exception is the MEPLAN model developed by Marcial Echenique and Partners in the UK. This one has been in use for many years, and one of its applications has been with the ongoing (since 1996) Cambridge Futures project.
