Optimising settlement locations : land-use/transport modelling in Cape Town

Abstract

Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Southern African Transport Conference 14 - 16 July 2003 "National issues affecting the movement of people and goods - strategic approaches", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa. ABSTRACT; Urban sprawl is a major characteristic of spatial developments in South African cities. Housing is continuously being located at the periphery of cities. Conversely, this spatial configuration has high implications for the level of transportation demand. In order to create compact cities, sustainable and environmentally sound urban land use and transport systems, integrated land use and transport planning is required. There remains an unresolved debate within the South African literature of the use of optimization models (tools), which seek to jointly solve for both travel activity patterns and urban activity allocations. Urban land use and transportation planning ought to be a highly interactive and a consensus-building process. Therefore models should be placed within spatially explicit decision support aids taking advantage of the latest geographic information systems to open up the process to land use and transport planners. The current debate in South Africa is focused on how and where new housing developments should be developed. However, there isn’t a land use-planning tool, which tries to predict the consequence of land use planning on the transport system at a local level. Spurred on by this interest the University of Cape Town is currently developing a land use model to help local governments in South Africa to integrate land use and transport planning. The model’s inputs consist of socio-economic data and network information and it calculates number of trips, kilometres and destinations.