Citation

Felsenstein D, Axhausen KW, Waddell P. J. Transp. Land Use 2010; 3(2): 1-3.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, The author(s), Publisher University of Minnesota, Center for Transportation Studies)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article serves as an introduction to a special issue on land use and transportation modeling with the UrbanSim program. As an open source and modular software system, using highly disaggregated data for dynamic simulation, UrbanSim has been instrumental in making integrated land-use transportation modeling accessible. This special issue of JTLU reports on this work and illustrates the various ways that UrbanSim and the collaborative OPUS framework (Open Platform for Urban Simulation) have been adapted. A central theme running through all the papers is that integrated land-use-transportation modeling in Europe presents a series of challenges and demands not necessarily present in the United States context in which UrbanSim was developed. The author outlines four factors that characterize the European land use environment, particularly as compared to that in the United States. The author then introduces each of the subsequent papers in the special issue. The paper by Waddell, Wang, Charlton, and Olsen describes the UrbanSim-OPUS platform for land-use-transportation modeling in the context of a model for San Francisco. The paper by Patterson, Kryvobokov, Marchal, and Bierlaire illustrates the use of data aggregation in the application of urbanism modeling in two similar-sized European contexts, Brussels and Lyons. The Rome paper (di Zio, Montanari, and Staniscia) illustrates the use of interpolation techniques in order to deal with data constraints relating to both travel time accessibility and land values in UrbanSim. Löchl and Axhausen show the paucity of land price data that plagues much land use simulation modeling can be side-stepped, using hedonic regression in an UrbanSim application for Zurich. Other papers deal with adaptation and extension of the individual behavioral models in UrbanSim. The author of this introduction notes that the initial gestation for many of the papers presented here was an informal European UrbanSim Users group meeting organized by Kay Axhausen at ETH, Zurich in 2008.