Facilitating land use forecasting in planning agencies

Abstract

History and current circumstances suggest that regional planning organizations will be major actors in the planning arena over the coming decades. Amongst other responsibilities they are now accountable for transportation and land use planning decisions which requires assessing the impacts of their transportation policies on land use development. Hence, these agencies are mandated to use sophisticated information management tools and complex land use modeling methods. Existing planning methods have proved to be extremely complex for use by regional agencies' untrained staff, which results in the inability of planning organizations to systematically assess the implications of their planning decisions. It has been proposed that Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) can be used as a tool to improve planning practice by allowing untrained agency personnel to make effective use of complex planning methods. In this paper, we explore the role of KBS in assisting agency staff who lack modeling experience to make effective use of a sophisticated land use model. The hypothesis is that KBS can help us increase the usability of urban models by replicating the decision making process performed by land use model experts; increased usability will, in turn, increase their applicability in planning practice. The Transportation Economic and Land Use model (TELUM) was the software developed to demonstrate how KBS can refine existing land use models and create easy and simple to use planning support systems. The research concluded that under certain conditions KBS could be used as a method to create a buffer between the complexity of a land use modeling system and the inexperienced user. © 2007 WIT Press.