Land-use forecasting

Land-use forecasting undertakes to project the distribution and intensity of trip generating activities in the urban area. In practice, land-use models are demand-driven, using as inputs the aggregate information on growth produced by an aggregate economic forecasting activity. Land-use estimates are inputs to the transportation planning process.

The discussion of land-use forecasting to follow begins with a review of the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS) effort. CATS researchers did interesting work, but did not produce a transferable forecasting model, and researchers elsewhere worked to develop models. After reviewing the CATS work, the discussion will turn to the first model to be widely known and emulated: the Lowry model developed by Ira S. Lowry when he was working for the Pittsburgh Regional Economic Study. Second and third generation Lowry models are now available and widely used, as well as interesting features incorporated in models that are not widely used.

Today, the transportation planning activities attached to metropolitan planning organizations are the loci for the care and feeding of regional land-use models. In the US, interest in and use of models is growing rapidly, after an extended period of limited use. Interest is also substantial in Europe and elsewhere.

Even though the majority of metropolitan planning agencies in the US do not use formal land-use models, we need to understand the subject: the concepts and analytic tools shape how land-use/transportation matters are thought about and handled; there is a good bit of interest in the research community where there have been important developments; and a new generation of land-use models such as LEAM and UrbanSim has developed since the 1990s that depart from these aggregate models, and incorporate innovations in discrete choice modeling, microsimulation, dynamics, and geographic information systems.

In brief, the CATS analysis of the 1950s was “by mind and hand” distribute growth. The product was maps developed with a rule-based process. The rules by which land use was allocated were based on state-of-the art knowledge and concepts, and it hard to fault CATS on those grounds. The CATS took advantage of Colin Clark’s extensive work on the distribution of population densities around city centers. Theories of city form were available, sector and concentric circle concepts, in particular. Urban ecology notions were important at the University of Chicago and University of Michigan. Sociologists and demographers at the University of Chicago had begun its series of neighborhood surveys with an ecological flavor. Douglas Carroll, the CATS director, had studied with Amos Hawley, an urban ecologist at Michigan.

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Wikipedia