Accessibility benefits of integrated land use and public transport policy plans in the Netherlands

In practice public transport projects were typically not part of an integrated planning and evaluation approach, and the CBA’s examined the costs and benefits of transport project only. In particular, the role of spatial planning or spatial developments in these CBA’s was ignored or not made explicit; i.e. land use is assumed to be fixed or does not differ between project alternatives.

In this paper we focus an integrated land-use/transport project, namely the new town development and public transport investments for the city of Almere, and examine if spatial planning can have a positive impact on the accessibility benefits and economic efficiency of the project alternatives. Two methodological issues were explored, in addition to current practice, to study these impacts. Firstly, a national land-use and transport interaction model, called Tigris XL, was used instead of a stand-alone transport model. Secondly , accessibility benefits were calculated following the logsum measures, in addition to the standard rule-of-half method.
The findings of the study, based on the application of the land-use and transport interaction model and logsum method, are:

• The construction plan of 60,000 houses in Almere would result in an potential increase of just under 50,000 jobs in this city. This is much lower than the expressed ambition of creating an additional 100,000 jobs in Almere;
• The logsum benefits of the public transport projects examined, in a given land-use scenario, are slightly larger than the benefits measured with the conventional rule of a half (20% to 30%, respectively);
• The different land-use policy alternatives for the new part of the town of Almere result in significant accessibility benefits, in the range of 90 to 130 million euros, annually, relative to the reference scenario. The accessibility benefits from the land-use scenarios exceed those from railway investments;
• Significant synergies may be achieved when land-use policies and public transport investments are better integrated. However, in our case study, this did not affect the outcome of the cost–benefit analysis. The synergy in accessibility benefits was found to be small compared to the huge investment costs of the public transport projects examined. All rail projects examined in the cost–benefit analysis continued to have strong negative welfare effects.

The paper is part of the book publication ‘Accessibility Analysis and Transport Planning, Challenges for Europe and North America’ as part of the NECTAR series and published by Edward Elgar publisher.