Case Study:

SPARTACUS

Conclusions

Strengths

The SPARTACUS project was admittedly a large-scale modeling project with substantial data and resource requirements. It is not necessary to apply all elements of the approach at once, however. For example, the GIS analysis of emissions and noise exposure can be applied independently of the land use model. Also, a smaller set of policy scenarios or impact measures can be defined.

Overall, the case study illustrates a number of features that are relevant to metropolitan-level transportation and land use scenario testing in the United States. Specifically:

• An urban land use-transportation model can be used as a platform to develop environmental, social, and economic indicators for assessing policy options. This allows the inclusion of intermediate effects, such as household and employment relocation in response to policies, that are not typically accounted for in a transportation model.
• Maintenance of land use and network data in a raster-based (grid cell) GIS environment allows environmental impacts, including air quality and noise, to be identified in a spatially disaggregate format. This allows both the total affected population and the distribution of impacts by socioeconomic group to be estimated. It also permits the effective graphical display of impacts.
• While exposure to air pollution and noise are traditionally measured only at a project level, simple pollutant dispersion and noise models can be used to assess these impacts at a regional level as well.
• The inclusion of truck traffic and an economically based land use model can more fully assess economic, transportation, and land use impacts that relate to industry as well as to households.
• Large amounts of information can be aggregated down to a small number of indicator values (e.g., environmental, social, and economic) based on a set of user-defined weights.
• Reduction, management, and display of large amounts of model-generated information can be facilitated with appropriate tools for post-processing model output.
• Screening of individual policies based only on land use-transportation model output reduces the time and effort involved, since post-processors do not have to be applied to every policy or combination. In addition, the thoughtful combination of promising policies, compared through an incremental process, can result in the reduction of a potentially large number of combinations to a manageable set of scenarios.

Equity and social justice implications of alternative scenarios can be quantified in a number of different ways. The SPARTACUS system allows the user to select any of four options for valuing equity impacts. While the selected option can impact the relative ranking of the scenarios, in the SPARTACUS study, those that performed well under one option tended to perform well under all four.

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