Microsimulating Urban Systems

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It has long been recognized that urban transportation systems and built form are fundamentally intertwined: the transportation system provides access to land, thereby making it usable and helping to shape the distribution, types and densities of activities over space, while the built form and its associated spatial distribution of activities generates the demand for transportation services and the performance of the transportation system through the loading of this demand onto the road, transit and active (walk/bike) networks. The various adverse, “unintended” impacts of urban transportation systems (congestion, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, accidents, etc.) are not solely the product of the transportation system, nor are “solutions” to these problems solely achievable through transportation system improvements. The way in which we build our urban regions is a fundamental determinant of transportation system performance, and more sustainable urban regions will require a coordinated and systematic redesign of both our built form and transportation systems. Recognition of this fundamental transportation – land use interaction directly implies the need for comprehensive, integrated models of transportation and land use that capture the two-way interactions between the two systems and that thereby allow the full impacts on an urban region of both transportation and land use policies to be systematically explored. With over 80% of Canadians living within urban regions, integrated urban models offer the potential to provide robust, credible forecasts of policy impacts to support improved, evidence-based decision-making concerning transportation and land use investments and policies. Given the billions of dollars that are expected to be spent in the coming decades on transit systems alone in this country, along with the serious challenges faced by our cities to remain high quality homes for our population in the face of continuing growth, such improved decision support tools can play a key role in finding cost-effective, sustainable paths into the future for our metropolitan regions. The Integrated Land Use, Transportation, Environment (ILUTE) model system is a state-of-the-art agent-based, integrated microsimulation model of urban spatial socio-economic processes (demographics, housing markets, travel, etc.). An operational prototype has previously been developed by the research team. The primary objective of the proposed research is to complete ILUTE as a fully operational tool for urban systems modelling and policy analysis. In addition to the development and deployment of this “ILUTE Version 1”, a second, longer-term objective of this research project is to begin work on the design of an “ILUTE 2.0” that is based on a strong, consistent theoretical framework, and new, emerging computational capabilities, datasets and modelling methods. This “2.0” design work will proceed in parallel with the “1.0” implementation. It will not result in an operational “2.0” system within the lifetime of this project, but it will lay the foundation for future work in this direction.