Integrated Land Use and Transportation Planning and Modelling: Addressing Challenges in Research and Practice

Academic research in integrated land use and transportation modelling is on the rise, in no small part due to growing interest from public agencies that need to improve their capacity to respond to complex policy questions arising in the context of transportation, land use and environmental planning. But the process of taking models developed in an academic research setting, where theoretical validity and the advancement of methodology receive high priority, and moving them into public agency settings in which priorities such as reliability, ease of use and staff capacity to explain to stakeholders what the models are doing, and why, create predictable gaps in understanding and can undermine a project. In this paper, we develop lessons from the experiences of multiple planning agencies in applying UrbanSim in their operational agency settings and integrating it with their transport model systems. In contexts as varied as Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Phoenix, Seattle and San Francisco, we find that there are common elements to the tensions of appropriating a model system for their own use. We assess how the evolution in the design of the model system has responded to policy and technical challenges presented by this domain, and propose directions for further development.