Senior Consultant at David Simmonds Consultancy Ltd - Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
David Simmonds Consultancy - DSC - specializes in research, analysis and forecasting applied to urban, regional and transport planning.The firm was set up in 1990 and has carried out a wide variety of studies for public and private clients in the UK and abroad. These studies have ranged from brief reviews of particular subjects to major projects in forecasting and impact assessment. Many have been carried out in collaboration with other leading firms in transport, planning, economics and property consultancy.One of our specialities is forecasting the impacts of transport on regional economies and on urban activities and development. In this we can consider the effects of public and private transport, passengers and goods, and changes in services and pricing as well as changes in infrastructure. We are also very much involved in forecasting the impacts of planning policies, that is, how plans for the physical development or redevelopment of an area will translate into numbers of households of different kinds, numbers of jobs, taking account of the impact that new developments will have on the occupancy of the existing stock. Much of our work is carried out using formal land-use models and land-use/transport interaction models, implemented in the DELTA software package which we have developed since 1995. We are also increasingly involved in appraisal; that is, not just forecasting what will happen, but analyzing by the benefits and disbenefits that will result and who will be affected by these.The Publications page on our website provides a wide range of material about the methods we use and a selection of the projects in which they have been applied.