Narsc2010 Geurs Et Al Excl Revs
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Accessibility benefit measurement of integrated land use and public transport investments: searching for synergies Paper for the 58th North American Annual Meetings of the Regional Science Association International, November 11-13, Denver, USA Karst Geurs(*), Michiel de Bok(#),Barry Zondag(±) (*)Centre for Transport Studies, University of Twente, Enschede (NL) (#) Significance, The Hague (NL), FEUP, Porto (PT) (±) Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, The Hague/Bilthoven (NL) Corresponding author: [email protected] 1 Introduction Major investments in public transport in the Netherlands are often not efficient from a welfare economic perspective; i.e. of about 150 cost-benefit analysis of public transport projects in the Netherlands conduced in the past decades only one third of the projects had a positive benefit/cost ratio (Bakker and Zwaneveld, 2010). These public transport projects were typically not part of an integrated planning approach, and the CBA’s examined the costs and benefits of transport project only. In particular, the role of spatial planning or spatial developments in these CBA’s was ignored or not made explicit; i.e. land use is assumed to be fixed or does not differ between project alternatives. In recent years, however, integrated spatial and transport planning is receiving more attention in Dutch national policy making. In 2007, a national policy document, Randstad Urgent, was published, aiming to improve cooperation between national and regional governments and create joint policy decision making process for different spatial projects and transport infrastructure projects that are to be realised within the same region (Ministry of Transport Public Works and Water Management, 2007). The policy document focused on 40 projects within Randstad Area; the most urbanised region in the western part of the Netherlands. The aim of this new approach is to speed up the decision making process of projects and increase the economic efficiency of the projects. So far, the Randstad Urgent approach has been successful in speeding up decision making processes (Ministry of Transport Public Works and Water Management, 2010), but does integrated land use and transport planning increase the economic efficiency of public transport projects? In this paper, we focus on one of the integrated land-use/transport projects included in Randstad Urgent and examine if spatial planning can have a positive impact on the accessibility benefits and economic efficiency of the project alternatives. The study concerns the largest housing development in the Netherlands in the next decades. It involves doubling of the size of the new town Almere located about 30 kilometres east of Amsterdam (see Figure 1). 1 Figure 1: New town Almere, 30 kilometers east of Amsterdam (source Google maps) The policy ambition is to build about sixty thousand dwellings in Almere and to create a hundred thousand additional jobs in the period up to 2030. The current Dutch national spatial planning policy projects a demand of half a million new dwellings for the Randstad area for the period up to 2040. As the Randstad area already is the most urbanized part of the country, where the four largest cities of the Netherlands are located, available land for urbanisation is scarce. Doubling the size of the new town Almere will be the largest housing project in the Netherlands in the next decades aiming to fulfil a major part of the demand for new dwellings in the north wing of the Randstad area. Local governments developed three spatial policy alternatives for the development of Almere with tailored public transport investment programs. Transport is of crucial importance for the further development of Almere. Almere is a new town built on reclaimed land (a polder) with two bridges linking two motorways (A6 and A27) and a railway (parallel to the A6) to the mainland. The current rail and road connections are already severely congested, and doubling the population of Almere is not possible without major infrastructure expansions. As part of the decision making process, a social cost-benefit analysis was conducted comparing three land use alternatives and more than 10 rail project alternatives (Zwaneveld et al., 2009). A national system of road pricing, currently under discussion, is also examined. In the CBA, a stand alone regional transport model was applied – as prescribed by Dutch appraisal guidelines - to estimate transport demand and travel time changes as input for the conventional rule-of-half measure of accessibility benefits. In addition, the land-use/transport interaction model TIGRIS XL model was used. Firstly, the TIGRIS XL was used to validate the projection of population and employment for Almere and the surrounding region under the proposed growth scenario. The housing scenario’s that were proposed were fixed and more or less undisputed. Reason for this is that historically the Dutch government had a strong influence on the development of other large residential development sites. For 2 example, the town of Almere itself is a clear result of planning of housing development sites in the Netherlands. Such planning practice does not exist regarding the location choice of firms and to a large extend market forces dominate the location choice of firms. Local governments aim to attract 100 thousand additional jobs in Almere. About half of the job growth is assumed to result from the population growth, the other half from stimulus strategies. The assumed job growth was highly disputed and research was requested to validate the job growth projections. The land use and transport interaction model TIGRIS XL was used to generate consistent population and employment forecast for Almere and surrounding regions (Zondag et al., 2009). A second reason for using TIGRIS XL is that the combination of land use plans with supportive public transport investment plans makes it a typical planning issue to be evaluated with an integrated land-use and transport interaction model (LUTI). These models are praised for their ability to evaluate land-use and transport planning in an integrated and consistent modelling system (e.g., see Simmonds, 2004; Waddell et al., 2007), however, compared to the large amount of literature, applications of empirically estimated land use models are rare. Its added value can be analyses when results are compared with the standard practice in the Netherlands, where stand alone transport models are used in economic appraisals of transport investments. Moreover, TIGRIS XL was used in earlier studies to estimate accessibility benefits of land-use and transport policy strategies using the logsum accessibility measure. The logsum proved to be an elegant and convenient solution to measure the full accessibility benefits from land-use and/or transport policies (Geurs et al., 2010). The logsum method has a number of advantages over applying the rule-of-half method. The most important advantage for this paper is that the logsum is capable of providing the accessibility benefits from changes in the spatial distribution of activities, due to transport or land-use policies, where the rule-of-half method ignores the changes in destination utility (see for an elaborate discussion Geurs et al. (2010). This approach potentially enriches policy appraisals. In particular, computing the logsum measure using the TIGRIS XL framework allows an estimation of the accessibility benefits of the different land use policy alternatives for the expansion of new town Almere, compared to a reference land use scenario. This is not possible with the conventional rule-of-half method, which is only valid when land uses are assumed to be fixed. Another advantage of the logsum method is that it uses a more precise non-linear demand curve, as the rule-of-half method assumes a linear demand curve. This is not the most important advantage, however. In theory, when land use is fixed, an accessibility benefit approximation based on the rule-of-half will only slightly differ from the more exact logsum measure when computed at the same level of aggregation (e.g., see for a comparison, Bates, 2006). Finally, the results from TIGRIS XL were used to validate the transport demand projections from the regional transport model used in the CBA. The regional transport model is regional version of the national transport model included in TIGRIS XL, and transport projections proved to be quite similar for the public transport alternatives examined. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the TIGRIS XL land use transport interaction model is applied in the analysis of integrated spatial and public transport planning scenarios and to present the main findings for the different development scenarios for Almere. The focus is on the estimation of accessibility benefits for the land-use and transport planning scenarios. Section 2 firstly describes the modelling framework and how accessibility effects are calculated. Section 3 describes the land use policy planning scenarios for new town. Sections 4 and 5 present the model results for the different scenarios regarding the population and employment developments and accessibility impacts. Section 6 examines if 3 there are synergies in accessibility benefits between the land use policy alternatives and rail investments. Finally section 7 presents the conclusions and discusses the results. 2 The TIGRIS XL model for land use and transport 2.1 Overview of TIGRIS XL Land-use and transport policies both affect the accessibility for firms and residents. A land- use and transport interaction model is capable of calculating accessibility changes, resulting from land-use and transport strategies. This includes the mutual interactions between land use and transport, over time, and the outcome is different from the sum of the two measures evaluated individually. In this study, the changes in accessibility are calculated by the TIGRIS XL model; an integrated land-use and transport model that has been developed for the Transport Research Centre in the Netherlands (RAND Europe, 2006; Zondag, 2007). The TIGRIS XL model is a system of sub-models (or modules) that includes dynamic interactions between them.