The Usefulness of Transport Models in Swedish Planning Practice

Abstract

This paper presents some experience from using transport models in Swedish planning practice. First we outline three recent examples of planning settings in which transport models have been put to extensive use. For the Swedish ‘national’ transport plan for the period 2010–2021, which was recently finished, the national transport model SAMPERS was used to compute costs and benefits for many investment projects. The second example concerns the ‘regional’ plan for Stockholm, where a similar but less detailed model, LuTRANS, was used to investigate different transport and land use scenarios. The third example discusses a recent study on the feasibility of introducing congestion charges in Gothenburg, where both a fixed demand approach and SAMPERS were used. Furthermore, the paper tries to help identify what model development can do to help improve the production of decision support through modelling. We argue that effectiveness and efficiency are key. The first is characterized by making sure that the right things are done and that they are done right. Efficiency, which is less often discussed in the literature, is framed in terms of doing things on time and doing them only once. The managing organization around a national model system can play an important role in helping users avoid redundant work. It is also a good idea to resist the temptation to use up all improvements in computing power for additional model features. There are many worthwhile analyses that are never done because of time constraints.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Swedish National Road Administration for financial support. We have benefited greatly from the discussions at the workshop on Transport Knowledge and Planning Practice held in Amsterdam, 14–16 October 2009, and from the anonymous referees on earlier versions of this paper.