Reducing Traffic Congestion in Beirut: An Empirical Analysis of Selected Policy Options

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Assessing Urban Policies Using a Simulation Model with Formal and Informal Housing: Application to Cape Town, South Africa

“…Land use and transport integrated (LUTI) simulation models which simultaneously predict land use and transport decisions have been designed for a few major cities in the world, and various modeling approaches have emerged, including TRANUS (de la Barra, 1989), UrbanSim (Wadell, 2000) and RELU-TRAN (Anas and Liu, 2007) among others (see Acheampong and Silva, 2015, for a full literature review of such models). Although these simulation models have mostly been applied to cities in the United States and Europe, they are increasingly being applied to metropolitan areas elsewhere (see for instance the recent applications of the RELU-TRAN model to Beijing (Anas and Timilsina, 2015) or Cairo (Anas et al, 2017)). In the case of South Africa, a local version of UrbanSim was developed by the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for the East Rand area, Durban and Nelson Mandela Bay (see Wray and Cheruiyot, 2015, for a survey of land use modeling in South Africa).…”

“…To our knowledge, our framework is the first two-dimensional urban economics spatial simulation tool to model the internal residential structure of a city with endogenously determined informal housing. 4 As a proof of concept, we conduct 'what-if' evaluations of policy scenarios, investigating the spatial consequences of policies relevant to the city of Cape Town. We first simulate the impact of an urban growth boundary adopted by Cape Town's metropolitan planning authority to limit sprawl.…”

“…Note that housing informality was first modeled byJimenez (1984 and1985) in a partial equilibrium setting. For a review of these models, see Brueckner and Lall (2015) 4. For a calibrated simulation model with housing informality but no internal city structure seeCavalcanti et al (2019).…”