A criticism levelled upon land use/transport modelling has been a relative lack of peer review and critique that are otherwise common to the development of economic and engineering techniques. Land use/transport modelling demands multi-disciplinary knowledge and understanding of complex quantitative relationships. However, a review and development process has started to emerge, for example, in the case of the London and South East Region Model (LASER). LASER is an interactive land use/transport model in which the land use model estimates demand for transport, and in which the generalised costs of transport become a major input to household and employment location modelling in the land use model. The model aims essentially to address the wider, strategic issues concerning planning and transport impacts of policy options, on a higher tier to those more focused transport models in the region such as LTS91, NAOMI, or PLANET. The earliest version of this model could be traced back to 1988. In 1997, an independent review study was carried out on the validation of version 2 of the LASER model. The study made some specific criticisms of the model and recommended that improvements were needed for future development. As a result, in 1999 the cost effectiveness of various improvement options was further examined, the criticisms made in the review study being taken on board. A new LASER version 3.0 has been under development since beginning of 2000. This new version is starting to be applied to two major multimodal studies in the area amongst other applications.
Abstract