A cellular automata-based land use and transport interaction model applied to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Understanding the interaction between urban land-use change and transport is critical for urban planning as well as for transport planning, particularly in the case of rapidly growing and motorising cities, such as Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Dynamic land use and transport interaction models provide a good platform to study this mutual interaction. In this paper, we introduce one instance of these models, a cellular automata (CA)-based land-use/transport interaction model (LUTI), which was applied to the quickly growing metropolitan area of Jeddah. The model was calibrated using a stage-wise calibration and evaluated using an independent validation. The CA-based LUTI model outperforms a similar stand-alone CA-based model, which indicates that land use and transport interact and that models for understanding urban dynamics benefit from including the feedback between both systems. Such understanding facilitates the estimation of future dynamics of land-use change and transport in cities, and can support the development of alternative spatial plans and policies.

► A CA-based land-use transport interaction model was applied to the city of Jeddah.
► A stage-wise calibration procedure allows calibrating such complex model.
► Results from this model outperform results from a standalone CA-based land-use model.
► This indicates the importance of transport for explaining dynamics in rapidly growing cities.