Transferability study of the Large Zone Economic Module (LZEM) of the SE3M model of land use and transportation

Models of urban land use are often used in the policy analysis process to forecast long-range impacts of various land use policies or urban infrastructure projects. For models that have been deemed suitable for multiple implementations, a critical, initial test of the model framework is to examine the model's transferability to other geographies. The purpose of this paper is to present a transferability study of the Large Zone Economic Module (LZEM) of the SE3M model of land use and transportation. The SE3M was initially implemented in the US territory of Guam. The islands of Puerto Rico and Oahu were selected as case studies for this model, transferability evaluation. LZEM is implemented with three base years (2000, 2002 and 2007) for these case studies and then validated to 2010 as horizon year for which validation data was available in the Puerto Rico and Oahu implementations. This paper presents evidence that LZEM is reasonably accurate when applied to other geographic regions and that if specific economic parameters are identified, the entire regional economy and the associated population and employment distribution can be spatially modeled within the LZEM framework.