Dear SD Community:
John Swansons question seems to have received reponses regarding the issue
of forecasting accuracy, but not on the topic area, urban transportation
dynamics.
Recently, as part of the Sustainability Institute, Don Seville and I have
been investigating the drivers of urban sprawl (for example, how the
population of the five county region around my hometown, Cleveland, Ohio
USA, is expected to decrease 3% from 1950 to 2010 while occupying 30% MORE
residential land). Our background work has led us to discover two recent
developments in the conceptualization of urban transportation dynamic
problems (and thus hold promise for models).
One is a section of John Stermans SD-textbook-in-progress, a draft of which
he is using in his MIT SD course. It has an extensive causal loop diagram
case study on the inability of policies to improve urban traffic congestion.
The second is a series of seminars that Nathan Forrester is running for city
leaders in Atlanta, Georgia (a government official reported that this city
was the "fastest spreading development in the history of civilization"
between 1990 and 1996) around urban dynamics and transportation policy. He
has an interesting model that supports the loop structures he creates with
the audience in his workshop.
Drew Jones
apjones@cheta.net