The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) produces land use and transportation forecasts for 7 counties in southeast Michigan, which includes the City of Detroit.

We used the gridcell version of UrbanSim to produce our 2035 Regional Development Forecast.

We are currently testing the parcel version of UrbanSim with data from Washtenaw County. In this project our base year database has:

• 132516 buildings
• 117408 parcels
• 132453 households
• 183522 jobs

We have done very limited testing and validation of the pilot model results. At a basic level, the model is producing results that obey the annual control totals for households and jobs. We are also seeing development of new buildings, along with a few demolitions. The pilot model is not interacting with our transportation model.

Using a computer with a single Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor and 2.5 GB RAM, it takes approximately 1.5 hours to run from 2008 - 2035.

We will complete our initial regional database by mid September ('09). We will begin testing the interaction of UrbanSim with our travel model (TransCAD?) in October. We hope to have meaningful results for the regional model by the end of the year.

-- PeterMcNally - 28 Aug 2009