It is commonly accepted that there is a two-way relationship between land use and transport in urban
areas. Land use affects transport, conditioning travel demand. Conversely, transport affects land use,
conditioning spatial distribution of activities and land market.
The problem of simulating mutual interactions between land use and transport has been tackled by socalled
Land Use Transport Interaction (LUTI) models. Different modelling approaches are present in
literature, which are generally grouped into three main categories: spatial micro-economic, spatial
interaction and spatial accounting models.
The paper presents a spatial accounting LUTI model, which relies on Multi-Regional-Input-Output
(MRIO) framework. The model has two main interacting components: an activity model and a transport
model, which allow to endogenously estimate activities generation and location, land prices, travel
demand and transport accessibility.
The proposed LUTI model has been specified and applied in an urban area, more particularly to the
town of Reggio Calabria (Italy). The objective of the application is the estimation of long-term impacts on
land use and passenger travel demand patterns when interventions on transport facilities and services are
planned at a strategic scale. The results confirm that MRIO framework offers the potentialities to bring
activity location, land use in line within travel demand modelling.
