This report describes and illustrates the use of a mathematical model, developed at TRRL, to study travel within a specified land-use pattern. The model, which is called lute, was designed with the primary aim of providing a means of testing a range of transport and land-use policies concerning housing densities and development control, public transport services, fares and subsidies, fuel consumption, fuel prices, car ownership levels and the demand for road space, speed limits, inner city congestion and parking difficulties. In so doing, the work also provided a test bed for research into modelling itself, in particular the ability of different modelling assumptions to reproduce observed travel behaviour. In its calibrated state the behaviour of the model appears to be in good agreement with observed travel behaviour. Its particular strengths lie in (a) the high spatial resolution made possible by the use of gaussian integration, which allows the model to represent walk accurately, (b) the more realistic representation of car availability, (c) the provision of bus services under financial and vehicle capacity constraints, and (d) the adoption of constraints on average travel time and numbers of journeys per person per day. These strengths were attained at the expense of omitting any explicit road network and limiting the provision of public transport to a single corridor, so as to keep complexity and computing costs within bounds. (Author/publisher)
Abstract