Current and Future Land Use Models

The urgency of the environmental debate has renewed the interest in the application of integrated models of urban land use and transportation. In the United States new legislation inspired by growing environmental awareness such as the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 requires that transportation planning must consider the interaction between transportation and land use in a consistent fashion – as it can be done only by land-use transportation models. However, this new interest in land use models also presents new challenges to the land use modelling community. A new generation of activity-based travel models and new neighborhoodscale transportation planning policies require more detailed information on household demographics and employment characteristics and the location of activities. Moreover, the models need to be able to predict not only economic but also environmental impacts of land-use transportation policies. Today there exist several operational urban land-use transportation models which have the potential to respond to these challenges. At the same time there exist exciting opportunities to incorporate new theoretical developments and methodologies into the field. The paper reviews the current state of the art of operational land-use transportation models using criteria such as comprehensiveness, overall structure, theoretical foundations, modeling techniques, dynamics, data requirements, calibration and validation, operationality and applicability and evaluates their suitability with respect to the new requirements and speculates about the most promising avenues to further improvement and diffusion of this kind of model.