01128742

Component

UrbanSim is an integrated transportation land-use model that has been under development since the late 1990s. Since its development it has received a fair bit of attention in the integrated modeling community. Its notoriety comes primarily from its extremely disaggregated approach. A number of papers describing the application of UrbanSim have appeared in the formal and grey literatures. Some of these papers report on successful applications of UrbanSim with little description of the amount of effort required to develop an operational model. Those that do report on the effort and challenges of using UrbanSim suggest that substantial data and human resources are required. One recent report quantifies the human resources requirements as an interdisciplinary team of four for four years. This reputation makes many potential users think twice before developing an UrbanSim model. The authors believe the only way to evaluate the potential of UrbanSim is by having a good understanding of what it can do and how much effort is required. Understanding UrbanSim, however, does not require having a fully operational model. This paper is aimed at researchers and institutions that would like to evaluate UrbanSim, but are concerned about the effort required. Based on two UrbanSim applications (Brussels in Belgium and Lausanne in Switzerland), this paper describes a process to develop a prototype UrbanSim model and how to use it to evaluate UrbanSim for application to a new region.

01120148

09-2015

English

17p

2009

Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting

DVD

Maps (2) ; References; Tables (2)

City planning; Land use planning; Prototypes; Sustainable development; Travel surveys; Urban development; Urban transit; Urban transportation

UrbanSim (Computer model)

Brussels (Belgium); Lausanne (Switzerland)

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2009 Paper #09-2015

TRIS, TRB

Jan 30 2009 6:20PM