Impacts of transport development on residence choice of renter households: An agent-based evaluation

Because of improving accessibility, transport developments play an important role on residence choice of renter households. In this paper, an agent-based model is developed to investigate impacts of different transport developments on residence choice of renter households in Tehran, the capital of Iran. In the proposed model, renter households are considered as agents who make a multi-objective decision and compete with each other to rent a preferred residential zone. Then, three transport development scenarios including construction a new highway, subway and bus rapid transit (BRT) line are simulated and resulting changes in residence choice of agents are evaluated. Results show that transport development scenarios significantly affect residence choice behavior of different socio-economic categories of renter households and lead to considerable changes in the residential demand, composition of residents, mean income level and mean car ownership in their vicinities.