A land-use transport-interaction framework for large scale strategic urban modeling

Abstract

We introduce a family of land use transportation interaction (LUTI) models which enable future employment, population and flows or trips between these activities to be explained and predicted. We begin by focusing on the generic spatial interaction model, noting the ways in which its components reflect demand and supply at different locations measured in terms of employment and working population. This suggests an equilibrium structure which is our starting point in developing a simplified version of the model which we extend to deal with four different activity sectors – housing, retail activities, schools, and health facilities. We use this generic structure to develop four related versions of the generic LUTI model equations for residential populations, retailing, education and hospitals which are all driven by employment in terms of where people live and work. This constitutes our integrated framework that we use in calibrating, that is fine-tuning the model to three urban areas (cities) in Europe: to Oxford and its county, Turin and its region, and Athens in its hinterland of Attica reflecting population volumes from 700,000, 1.7 million and 3.8 million persons respectively. In each case, we use the models to predict the impact of different scenarios – new housing developments in Oxfordshire, new universities and metro lines in Turin, and economic development in the Athens region. We describe the details of these scenarios in Supplementary Information (SI) which shows the versatility of using the models to examine such impacts and we conclude with directions for improving the various models and nesting them at different scales within the land use-transport planning process.