A simulation platform for transportation, land use and mobile source emissions

This study describes an integrated platform model for assessing the interaction among land use, transportation, and mobile source emissions. In the proposed integrated framework, LandSys, a home grown land use model, produces land use change over the dimensions of space and time, allocates land use forecast results in terms of household and employment at the traffic analysis zone (TAZ) level, and feeds these socioeconomic data into a travel demand model, the Florida Standard Urban Transportation Model Structure (FSUTMS). Then, the produced travel time and accessibility index by FSUTMS are fed back into LandSys to quantify the emissions. Finally, the emissions from standalone FSUTMS and integrated framework are compared to quantify the air quality benefits of the land use development from the integrated land use and transportation model. In the case application of Orange County, Florida in the United States in 2000, 2012 and 2025, five major indicators of transportation networks were used: link saturation in the transportation network, overall vehicle miles traveled (VMT), vehicle hours traveled (VHT), mobile source greenhouse gas emissions and fuel consumption. The results show that the values of the five indicators were lower when utilizing the integrated platform than was predicted by the standalone FSUTMS models, which demonstrates that the integrated platform achieved greater effectiveness in environmental improvements by considering the interactions between land use and transportation.