Integrated Land Use and Transport Planning in Jeddah: Policy Assessment and Simulation

During the past four decades the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, has witnessed a remarkable rapid urban growth. This has coincided with lack of a planning framework, weak institutional and poor policies, which have caused haphazard and interrelated land use and transportation issues. Current land use and transport planning policies and practice in Jeddah seem to focus on different visions, causing that neither land use nor transport issues are dealt with effectively or efficiently. To prevent dealing with these issues in isolation, Jeddah’s urban planners require methods of integrated land use transport planning that can cope with the dynamics of Jeddah’s urban growth. Dynamic land use and transport interaction models provide a rich method to deal with this. Therefore, in this study a CA-based LandUse Transport Interaction (LUTI) model was used to assess and simulate different (proposed) land use and transport policy interventions in Jeddah city over a period of 20 years (2011-2031). The impact of both isolated and integrated policy interventions on land use and transportation were explicitly simulated in the model. The results show that the dynamic model provides a useful tool for simulating the various planning visions in the city. As such, it provides an innovative and proactive land use transport planning approach to face land use and transportation challenges in the early planning stages, and facilitates shared visions; policies and integrated strategies that in turn may provide a more sustainable land use and transport future for Jeddah city.