Modeling The Effects of Oregon’s Transportation Planning Rule on Land Use Development Patterns and Traffic Congestion

We propose an agent-based simulation model to examine the effects of Oregon’s Transportation Planning Rule (TPR) on land use development patterns and, in turn, the effect of those development patterns on traffic. The TPR is a statewide planning requirement that local governments must assess the traffic impacts of land use changes. To this end, we design an artificial city to simulate interactions between land use development and traffic. The simulated city has an environment of travel corridors and land uses. In addition, two types of agents move on the artificial city: Citizen and Developer agents. Citizen agents interact with the environment through activity of visiting land uses and collectively creating traffic on the corridors. Developer agents interact with the environment by converting vacant land to developed land based on local activity levels and/or development costs. We conclude that this agent based model demonstrates phenomenon described by planning professionals: when costs based on TPR performance metrics are imposed, development levels reduce and are deflected away from areas of high activity and traffic. While the model was able to show low-density development patterns caused by TPR performance metrics, there were insufficient interactions to cause higher trips distances by Citizen agents. We also found that the model was sensitive to the structure of decision-making by developers, suggesting that further exploration of realistic cost-benefit analysis of developers would improve the model’s relevance.