use of travel modelling as a key component of regional transport planning. The models’ rise in popularity can also be attributed to a rapid increase in the number of automobiles on the road, widespread suburbanization and a large increase in federal or national government spending upon transport in urban areas. All of these phenomena dominated the planning culture in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Regional transport planning was needed because increasingly cities weren’t just cities anymore, but parts of a complex regional system. The US process, according to Johnston (2004) and the FHWA and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) (2007), generally follows a pattern which can be divided into three different stages. Over the course of each of three phases, the metropolitan planning organization (MPO) is also supposed to consider air quality and environmental issues, look at planning questions in a fiscally constrained way and involve the public. In the first stage, called preanalysis, the MPO considers what problems and issues the region faces and what goals and objectives it can set to help address those issues. During this phase the MPO also collects data on wide variety of regional characteristics, develops a set of different alternatives that will be explored as part of the planning process and creates a list of measurable outcomes that will be used to see whether goals and objectives have been achieved. Johnston notes that many MPOs perform weakly in this area, and though many of these activities seem like the “soft” aspects of planning that aren’t really necessary, they’re absolutely essential to ensuring that the models used in second phase are accurate and complete . The second phase is technical analysis. The process involves much technical maneuvering, but basically the development of the models can be broken down as follows. Before beginning, the MPO collects enormous amounts of data. This data can be thought of as falling into two categories: data about the transport system and data about adjacent land use. The best MPOs are constantly collecting this data. The actual analysis tool used in the US is called the Urban Transportation Modeling System (UTMS), though it is often referred to as the four-step process. As its nickname suggestions, UTMS has four steps: trip generation, trip distribution, mode choice and trip/route assignment. In trip generation, the region is subdivided into a large number of smaller units of analysis called traffic analysis zones (TAZs). Based