Integrated Land Use and Transportation Modeling within Data-Poor Contexts

Abstract

Integrated Land Use and Transportation Models (ILUTMs) are revolutionary planning support tools that have been used in the developed countries since the early 1990s. ILUTMs evolved in response to the complexity of the urban planning pro-cess, which became more communicative and collaborative process involving different stakeholders with diverse and con-flicting interests. The main challenge for the ILUTMs to be used in the developing countries is the cost of rich data needed for these models to give satisfactory results. This paper discusses the technical problems facing the researchers and the ur-ban planners in adopting ILUTMs. The research proposes an alternative modeling approach that makes ILUTMs applicable in the developing countries’ context. The suggested approach is centered on the idea of functioning within data-poor con-text instead of the costly data-rich context. The paper concludes with the expected limitations in the new modeling ap-proach and suggests some guidelines for the researchers in order overcome these limitations.