Integrated urban models represent the interactions between transportation and land use evolution in a comprehensive, coordinated way so that the impacts of transportation accessibility on land development and household and firm location processes can be assessed, with these urban form processes, in turn, determining the spatial pattern of travel demand. Integrated urban models provide practical platforms for “systems of systems” modelling of urban spatial-temporal socio-economic processes (travel, housing markets, demographics, etc.) in support of a wide variety of transportation and land use policy analyses.
ILUTE (Integrated Land Use, Transportation, Environment) model system is a state-of-the-art agent-based, microsimulation system for the GTHA, and the agent-based, activity-based travel microsimulation model TASHA (Travel/Activity Scheduler for Household-Agents), both developed at UofT, provide a cutting-edge platform for urban systems analysis and decision-support. This project took ILUTE/TASHA as its foundation for the development of economic performance measures for improved policy analysis and decision-making three related applications:
1. A transportation Benefit/Cost Analysis framework to inform transportation investment policy development.
2. Integrated modelling capacity to assess the viability and revenue generating potential of different Land Value Capture tools that can be piloted using live transportation investment proposals drawn from the GTHA (e.g. public land development, tax increment financing).
3. A dynamic model to assess the costs of different forms of development (e.g., greenfield versus brownfield, or higher versus lower rates of density).