Section: New Results

On the acceptability of land use transport integrated models by French end users as operational tools: from understanding to daily use

Land Use and Transport Integrated models (LUTIs) are promising approaches for urban planning. There is large literature describing their technical architectures or using them in various scientific contexts. Yet little attention has been paid to expectations of practitioners (planners) and to the daily use of such models. There is clearly an important gap between research and practice: a daily use of LUTIs for the simulation of regional planning policies is still an exception in France, despite important research investments and recent interest of planning agencies., and this situation does not seem to be specific to France. We worked on sheding light on what would make them definitely accepted and more used by planners to evaluate a range of urban and transport policies. To do so, we have interviewed different types of end users in France to identify their motivations and barriers to use LUTI models, in addition to literature study and our own experience dealing with urban planning agencies. We have analysed the main obstacles that prevent LUTIs from being widely used by local authorities. It is important to identify that there are two main issues: 1) Do current LUTIs really answer the questions and practical issues territorial agencies are confronted with on a day-to-day basis? Do they match their interests and expectations? 2) Are current LUTIs suitable with respect to the constraints and limitations of local agencies? The main obstacles associated with these issues are: first, it is difficult to match rather generic models with very specific and varied end users questions; second, it is costly and heavy to implement and use a LUTI (capacity obstacles); third, there is no guarantee that results of a dedicated LUTI will have any impact on the policy design (decision making obstacles). The results of our analysis show demand for a far more bottom-up oriented approach: the models should consider objectives and general needs of end users to live up to their expectations. Only a closer collaboration between modelers and end users, and more efforts to integrate modeling into urban planning, will make LUTIs considered as relevant approaches.

This work has been done in collaboration with Mathieu Saujot (IDDRI) and Mathieu De Lapparent (IFSSTAR), and belongs to the work program of CiTIES project.