Sustainability and the city: An evaluation of policy scenarios using an integrated land-use and transport model

As part of an EPSRC-funded research programme on sustainable cities, an integrated building stock, transport and energy model has been built of the town of Swindon, Wiltshire. The model, an application of TRANUS, predicts the location of floorspace used by different activities and simulates the associated traffic flows. It also calculates the energy consumed by land-use and transport across the study area. It has been used to explore four different scenarios for the growth of Swindon up to the year 2016, which are intended to reflect the scope of the debate about sustainable cities. The model indicates that for towns of this size, land-use changes alone would not have large effects on reducing the amount of car travel or encouraging a modal shift to public transport, cycling and walking. Instead the integration of both transport and land-use policies are needed to produce any significant changes. Shifts away from car travel were most noticeable in land-use policies which direct new developments to satellite villages, as against those policies that sought containment of development within towns. In all of the scenarios modelled, it is changes in the behaviour of middle-income groups - changes to more efficient housing types and reduced car travel - that bring about the most significant energy savings.