Toward a joint modeling of land-use, transport and economy

It is widely accepted that spatial settlement and transportation are closely related: land use changes have impacts on the performance of the transportation network and changes in the transport system have impacts on settlement behavior. In a recent workshop on evaluation of large transport related infrastructure projects, in which research findings in The Netherlands and the UK were compared, it was concluded that determination of indirect effects related to a new spatial equilibrium, remains a challenge in project evaluation. Indirect effects related to large infrastructure projects may well exceed the direct effects. A research project has started at Delft University of Technology to develop a suitable model instrument for a dynamic modeling of the land-use and transportation system and assessment of economic impacts. The research will use and extend the existing MOBILEC model of the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management in the Netherlands. The MOBILEC model is an interregional model that describes the relationship between economy, mobility and infrastructure. The model is a neoclassical growth model and uses macroeconomic relationships on the level of regions. In the paper a short overview will be presented of the overall framework for the modeling. Incorporation of the mutual influences of the economy, land-use and transport sectors receive special emphasis in this framework. The economy, transport system, labor market and housing market are endogenous in the modeling. The particular contribution of this dissertation research is the development of a model for the labor and housing market and the integration of these markets in the MOBILEC framework. In the current modeling the scale level of the COROP-regions (40 economical zones in the Netherlands) is used to determine of the real geographic product. In the new version the determination of the real geographic product will remain at the COROP-level, but for the housing an labor market a more detailed scale level will be used. At this detailed scale level the potential or attractiveness of zones for settlement of particular functions will be derived from the characteristics of the location itself and the accessibility to facilities in the region (employment, recreational, etc.). Discrete choice techniques will be used to determine the user preferences for settlement. The labor and housing market module will operate in a dynamic environment with a long term perspective, time increments of 3 years will be used. In the MOBILEC model an extended Cobb-Douglas production function is used to calculate the real geographic product of a region. One of the factors in the function concerns productive traffic. In this way the impact of the productive mobility (freight transport and business traffic) on the regional geographic product can be calculated. The inclusion of the housing market and labor market in the framework creates extra opportunities to analyze land-use and transport related issues, such as: indirect economical impacts as agglomeration effects or labor market imperfections. In the first version the agglomeration effects will be included in the real geographic product. analysis of spatial - and transport policies in an integrated way. analysis of commuter traffic in more detail.