Simulating household budgets for housing and transport

Today’s hot topics in urban planning, such as smart growth, high energy prices or congestion pricing, require integrated land-use/transportation models to analyze the impact of such scenarios. The majority of land-use models available today are either not integrated with transportation models or require a large amount of data and are challenging to calibrate. SILO (Simple Integrated Land-Use Orchestrator) is a robust yet simple land-use model that can be fully integrated with a transportation model. It is designed to be built with incomplete data and limited time and monetary resources. SILO has been designed as a microsimulation, simulating each household individually. This helps representing the interaction between single agents, and it further allows integrating SILO with both aggregate (4-step) and disaggregate (activity-based) travel demand models. The pilot application has been implemented for the Minneapolis/St. Paul Metropolitan Area. The model currently simulates households (including moves, birth, death, marriage, divorce and leaving the parental household) and the dwelling real-estate market (including construction, renovation, deterioration, demolition and change in rent). It is planned to extend the model to simulate employment and the non-residential real-estate market as well. In anticipation of high energy prices, the model is designed to ensure that households do not exceed their monetary budgets. If commuting under high energy prices exceeds the travel budget, the household will move either to a location closer to work or the household will move to a less expensive dwelling and rearrange the share between housing and travel budgets. This method ensures that households do not exceed their budgets, even under severe energy price increases.     «

Today’s hot topics in urban planning, such as smart growth, high energy prices or congestion pricing, require integrated land-use/transportation models to analyze the impact of such scenarios. The majority of land-use models available today are either not integrated with transportation models or require a large amount of data and are challenging to calibrate. SILO (Simple Integrated Land-Use Orchestrator) is a robust yet simple land-use model that can be fully integrated with a transportation mo...     »