Evaluation of a transit-oriented development scenario in a medium-sized French city by simulation models

TOD (transit oriented development) is a land planning approach that aims at developing harmoniously a transit network and the land it deserves both at the local and at the regional scale. It has been implemented successful in several large North and South American cities. Its transposition to Europe and small to medium cities is not straightforward, especially because European cities are much more dense than American ones, and transit is already well developed. However, TOD can also be considered as a means to coordinate existing land use and transport planning, and this is a major issue for all cities whatever their size or their density. Indeed, there is a co-production relationship between transport and land use, and the city development is systemic with many feedback loops between its subsystems. We show in this paper that a medium-sized city such as Besanon in France can benefit from a TOD approach for its development by designing scenarios and evaluating them with a LUTI model.