UrbanSim

The process of planning and constructing a new light rail system or freeway, setting an urban growth boundary, changing tax policy, or modifying zoning and land use plans is often politically charged. Our goal in the UrbanSim project is to provide tools for stakeholders to be able to consider different scenarios, and then to evaluate these scenarios by modeling the resulting patterns of urban growth and redevelopment, of transportation usage, and of environmental impacts, over periods of 20-30 years. UrbanSim, combined with transportation models and macroeconomic inputs, performs simulations of the interactions among urban development, transportation, land use, and environmental impacts. It consists of a set of interacting component models that simulate different actors or processes within the urban environment.