Participatory design of an integrated land use - Transportation modeling system: First steps

Land use and transportation models play an important role in guiding decisions about such matters as transportation infrastructure construction and land use policy. Previous land use and transportation modeling systems have largely been black boxes, understandable only by experts in the field. For the last several years we have been developing and deploying a land use modeling system, UrbanSim, which is integrated with a transportation model. We will be redesigning and generalizing this system, and in the process will attempt to open the black box. We plan to use a participatory design process, bringing in a variety of stakeholders, to determine what are the important attributes to model, how users should interact with the model, and how the results can be most usefully presented.