Co-evolution of Transportation and Land Use: Modeling Historical Dependencies in Land Use and Transportation Decision Making

US Transportation Collection2009PDFTech ReportZhang, LeiXu, WeiLi, MingxinUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.). Department of Civil and Environmental EngineeringOregon Transportation Research and Education ConsortiumOregon Transportation Research and Education ConsortiumOregonLand useLand use planningTransportation planningMathematical modelsTransportation--Planning--Decision making--Mathematical modelsLand use--Planning--Decision making--Mathematical modelsOTREC-RR-09-07Final report.The interaction between land use and transportation has long been the central issue in urban and regional planning. Models of suchinteractions provide vital information to support many public policy decisions, such as land supply, infrastructure provision, and growthmanagement. Both the transportation and land use systems exhibit historical dependencies in policy decisions. For instance, the expansion of aroadway today will change travel demand patterns, and make certain other roads more or less likely to be expanded in the future. A specific landsupply decision made at one point in time, by changing the relative attractiveness of other areas in the region, can have a profound impact onfuture land supply decisions. Today\u2019s land use decisions clearly influence future transportation policies and vice versa.This project examines the land use-transportation interaction from an evolutionary perspective \u2014 once a certain set of goals are determined andpursued by politicians and planners, their land supply and transportation investment decisions are, to a large extent, driven by their previousdecisions and supply-demand dynamics in the urban system. Built upon this recognition of historical dependency and a transportation networkgrowth model previously developed by the P.I., a model of the co-evolution of land use and transportation is proposed in this project. Differentfrom existing integrated land use and transportation models that assume exogenous network investment decisions, the co-evolution modelconsiders both land use growth and transportation network growth as endogenous and market-driven. The central research question is how marketand policies translate into transportation facilities and land use developments on the ground. The co-evolution model achieves an Urban GrowthEquilibrium, which is a useful concept for planning and policy analysis. An agent-based simulation approach is employed to integrate an existingland use model and the transportation network growth model.125