Modelling land use in the Generic Urban Model

Land-use and transport interaction models are appropriate instruments to forecast land-use responses to transport change. Such models are dynamic in structure, and iterate between transport and land-use components to model how the system evolves over time. This research presents the development of a land use component of the Generic Urban Models (GUM) Phase 2 project, sponsored by the UK Department for Transport. The land use component is part of a forecasting model for the Leicestershire region in the UK. Besides the application of the model for the Leicestershire County Council, the generalised approach can be used by the UK Department for Transport to test impacts of transport policies and exogenous developments on larger urban areas throughout Great Britain. The land use component is based on the TIGRIS XL model, an integrated land use and transport model that has been developed for the Transport Research Centre in the Netherlands. The land-use model uses discrete time steps of one year to generate population segmentation and employment figures by zone. A dynamic integration is made with the Central Leicestershire Transport Model every 5 years. The land use model incorporates four specific land-use components: a demography module, a land-use and real estate market module, a housing market module and a labour market module. In the application of the model to the Leicestershire case study, data from various sources has been used. The base year data are derived from the UK Census, Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) and National Travel Survey (NTS). Exogenous scenario inputs are taken from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Population Statistics and the TEMPRO database. The household and employment location coefficients are taken from estimations on extensive Dutch datasets. These coefficients will be verified with the available UK data. Further developments could include the estimation of new coefficients for the UK. The presented modelling approach provides consistent forecasts of the spatial distribution of residents and jobs, tailored to the needs of the transport model. In practice, bringing together the land use and transport models will contribute to the ex ante analysis of policy packages targeting at sustainable development. As the EC fifth framework project PROPOLIS has indicated that policy packages combining infrastructure and zoning policies are much more efficient then individual measures. The GUM model is well suited to evaluate such integrated policy packages, particularly because green field and brown field developments are explicitly accounted for within the land use model component. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135582.