Dutch retail planning strongly focuses on limiting traffic growth. By prohibiting out-oftown shopping development, policy makers have indirectly attempted to limit car use. The decentralization and liberalization of this policy has rekindled interest in out-oftown shopping schemes, thus reopening discussions on traffic impacts of these developments. One problem in this discussion is that models to measure this impact are for a large part based on the researchers’ own intuition and their allegiance toward policymakers. In the research project “Megaland” the Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research (RPB), a new model has been developed to estimate both economic and traffic impact. In addition to distance, consumer choice is dependent on attractiveness of shopping destinations. Attractiveness is based on purchase motive, entropy (number of different shops) and accessibility (for all motives). All these factors were combined in the Megaland model, enabling predictions of future shopping patterns and their impact on the retail structure, travel distance and modal split. As the work is still in progress, the results are not included in this paper, but will be presented at the colloquium itself. (author/publisher)
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