The Metro Cebu Land Use and Transport Study (MCLUTS) adopted a strategic planning process that involved the testing and evaluation of alternative land use and transportation plans. This type of approach was evolved from transportation studies first carried out in the United States in the 1960s. In past studies, plans had been formulated with a fixed land use, i.e., only the transportation networks varied. The land use would be determined separately by a relatively simple procedure. In some cases, a single land use would be directly formulated. A disadvantage of this approach is that the transportation network chosen may be optimum only in so far as the land use formulated was considered; it is possible that a different network could have resulted had other viable land uses been tested. Moreover, this approach fails to recognize the inter-relationships between land use and transportation; that is, transportation may affect land use in the same way that the latter affects the former. The fixing of land use is opted to reduce the task of plan testing and evaluation, which is usually time-consuming and demanding in the use of computer resources.
In MCLUTS, the testing and evaluation of plans is not limited to a single land use. A number of viable options have been formulated and, for each option, one or more compatible pairs of land uses and transportation networks have been developed and evaluated. The only simplifying assumption used was that the Metro Cebu total for each of the planning parameters such as population, employment and school enrolment remained fixed for all plans; only the zonal distributions varied between options.
The simultaneous treatment of land use and transportation in plan testing, evaluation, and selection is referred to as land use transportation interactive analysis. This analysis, which is the subject of this paper, has been carried out by MCLUTS using a computer model called TRANSTEP.