Major cities in developing countries are undergoing massive transportation infrastructure construction, which has significant impacts on the land use and economic activities in these cities. Standard Cost–Benefit Analysis (CBA) is applied to quantify the user benefits of transport projects, but does not provide an answer as to who will obtain the benefits and who will lose out and excludes the calculation of Wider Economic Impacts (WEIs) which can sometimes be large and hardly negligible. This paper introduces thoughts and experiences obtained through the design and development of an integrated land use transport model for the assessment of the WEI of a transport infrastructure project. The development and application of such an integrated model for WEI analysis should help decision-makers understand not only the “direct or immediate” impact of transport infrastructure on mobility, but also those “indirect or long-term” impacts on the distribution patterns of economic activities, corresponding land use, and resulting urban structure.

Massive construction of transportation infrastructure and fast growth of private car ownership have brought unprecedented changes in land use and transportation systems to cities and regions in many developing countries. Traditional “four-step” travel demand models, which are not designed to assess transport policies under the case of rapid land-use change, cannot be used to achieve coordinated planning of transport and land use. Therefore, there is a pressing need to develop and use integrated land-use transport models (ILUTMs), which consider interactions among socioeconomic activities, urban land use, and transportation development, for policy analysis and for guiding the progressive urbanization process taking place in many parts of these countries. In light of this, efforts have been invested in developing production, exchange, and consumption allocation system (PECAS) models for the cities of Shanghai, Wuhan, and Guangzhou in mainland China. This paper presents the cultural, organizational, and technical challenges encountered in the development of PECAS models for the cities of Shanghai, Wuhan, and Guangzhou and the mitigating solutions from the development teams for taking up or working around them. The solutions and discussions presented in this paper should be interesting to researchers and practitioners for developing ILUTMs in the context of a developing country like China.