Lessons for Adopting Microeconomic Land Use Models at the City Scale: Perth Case Study

Major transport infrastructure has the potential to significantly influence land use development, with increased development likely along its corridors. The land use (population and employment) inputs into the Perth Strategic Transport Models are currently produced at the small area level using a rule-based approach, Metropolitan Land Use Forecasting System (MLUFS). This approach does not explicitly take accessibility into account and limits the analysis of transport infrastructure programs and their impact on land-use intensification. An improved behaviour-based strategic land-use model to predict the potential impacts of major transport infrastructure on land-use development patterns was identified as a modelling imperative for Western Australia’s planning and transport agencies (Taplin et al., 2014). CUBE Land was selected because it is behaviourally sound and specifically addresses the land-use and transport interaction. This paper presents an active research case study, undertaken by researchers at PATREC, on the implementation of an equilibrium land use model for Perth. In addition the paper reports a short survey of the use and experience of Cubeland completed by other jurisdictions, worldwide.