Urbanization and motorization, which are closely related to economic growth, have been growing at a tremendous pace in many Asian developing countries since the last decade of the 20^th century. As cities accommodate the ever increasing housing and travel demands, undesirable side-effects emerge, such as worsening traffic congestion, housing shortage, as well as other inequity issues. Nowadays, the great challenges faced by many Chinese local governments usually include: how to maintain a relatively high level of economic efficiency without sacrificing the benefits of other interest groups; how to deal with the problems of financing large-scale transport infrastructure investments; how to formulate policies to accommodate the ever increasing urban population via transport and housing sup...[ Read more ]

Urbanization and motorization, which are closely related to economic growth, have been growing at a tremendous pace in many Asian developing countries since the last decade of the 20^th century. As cities accommodate the ever increasing housing and travel demands, undesirable side-effects emerge, such as worsening traffic congestion, housing shortage, as well as other inequity issues. Nowadays, the great challenges faced by many Chinese local governments usually include: how to maintain a relatively high level of economic efficiency without sacrificing the benefits of other interest groups; how to deal with the problems of financing large-scale transport infrastructure investments; how to formulate policies to accommodate the ever increasing urban population via transport and housing supply under uncertain economic situations. It suffices to say that it is desirable to develop a broader analytical framework of an integrated land use and transport system, where the performances of alternative land use and transport strategies can be assessed.

This thesis identifies stakeholders in an integrated land use and transport system and models their interactions. The main objective is to study long-term planning strategies to facilitate joint land use and transport development. A combined equilibrium formulation is then developed to model residents’ location and travel choices, as well as real estate developers’ housing supply decisions. The existence and uniqueness of solution of this network equilibrium formulation are analyzed through an equivalent mathematical program. Based on the equilibrium formulation, the impacts of long-term transport supply and demand management strategies (TS-DM) on both residents’ location and travel choices and other land use patterns, e.g. land value, are studied. The overall problem is formulated as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) expressed in a quasi-dynamic structure. Analytical results are derived to show that transport improvements benefit landowners or developers rather than tenants under the scenario of homogeneous value of time; and benefit people with a higher income more under the scenario of heterogeneous value of time. These results point to the possible regressive effect of transport infrastructure improvements – a phenomenon rarely addressed in the literature. For general networks with multiple OD pairs, where analytical results are not available, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the effects of TS-DM strategies, which generally echo the analytical results developed for the case with one OD pair. In addition, a full information maximum likelihood estimation method (MLE) for parameters estimation of the combined equilibrium model is developed and tested through two case studies.

Based on the combined equilibrium framework developed, this thesis extends the deterministic approach, wherein population and demand growths are assumed to be perfectly known, to a stochastic approach under demand uncertainty through the methodology of recourse planning by formulating the problem as a multi-stage stochastic program. The performance of the resultant adaptive TS-DM strategy is evaluated and compared with the deterministic approach through numerical examples. The results are promising, illustrating the benefit of developing adaptive TS-DM strategies.

In addition to developing transport management strategies, the possibility of developing integrated land use and transport strategies is also investigated. Based on the perspective of transit oriented development (TOD), a joint rail and housing investment model for a single profit-oriented developer is developed. Analytical results are derived for the case of one OD pair. Sensitivity analyses are conducted to further illustrate the analytical properties, especially in terms of benefit distribution between residents and the TOD supplier.