Densification and Urban Compaction: Reinforcing the Drive for Sustainability
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The consumer response to sustainable development initiatives provided the focus for a series of research projects undertaken at the Transport Research Institute at Napier University. Evidence of the relationship between residential density and travel behavior is presented. Results are presented from a large household survey undertaken in four settlement classes within one key commuter corridor of the Belfast City (Northern Ireland, United Kingdom) region to determine their comparative sustainability in terms of travel behavior. It can be concluded that wide-scale land use policies can achieve significant reductions in overall private vehicle travel in urban areas. Densification is best suited to established urban areas and for influencing modal shift primarily to walking rather than public transit. The work also suggests that a more focused approach to planning decisions reflecting housing market segment preferences could yield a win-win situation for house owners and developers, albeit at the expense of some reduction in residential plot size. Local changes can bring global benefits. A great challenge falls to the urban designer to ensure that such trade-offs do not unduly undermine quality of life. Further thoughts are provided on the implications for policy makers in car-dominated cities in the United States.Keywords:
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Human settlement
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The relative significance and influence of a variety of measures of urban form on household vehicle kilometers traveled, automobile ownership, and mode choice were investigated. The travel data came from the 1990 San Francisco Bay Area travel surveys, and the land use data were largely constructed from hectare-level descriptions provided by the Association of Bay Area Governments. After demographic characteristics were controlled for, the measures of accessibility, land use mixing, and land use balance—computed for trip-makers’ home neighborhoods and at trip ends—proved to be highly statistically significant and influential in their impact on all measures of travel behavior. In many cases, balance, mix, and accessibility were found to be more relevant (as measured by elasticities) than several household and traveler characteristics that often form a basis for travel behavior prediction. In contrast, under all but the vehicle ownership models, the impact of density was negligible after accessibility was controlled.
Hectare
Mode choice
Travel survey
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Econometric model
Travel survey
Discrete choice
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Mode choice
Sustainable transport
Social Exclusion
Transportation planning
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Transit-oriented development (TOD) is an urban designed model aimed at attracting more sustainable travellers. However, not all TOD projects succeed in maintaining a high rate of sustainable travel behaviour. To examine the impacts of TOD on residents’ travel behaviour, this paper applies binary logistic regression to analyse survey data for 1,298 residents living in the TOD areas in Hangzhou collected in 2020. The results show that socioeconomic characteristics, built environment factors, and travel attitudes play important roles in influencing their travel mode choices. Furthermore, the number of children in households and higher levels of car ownership significantly influence residents’ sustainable travel behaviours. However, it appears that only a limited number of factors can convince car users to shift to sustainable modes of travel, such as their workplace being accessible by metro and attitudes towards changes in accessibility. This research study contributes to the existing literature in terms of enhancing the understanding of travel mode choice behaviours, particularly with regard to people who live near public transport infrastructure, as well as formulating evidence-based TOD policies to achieve more sustainable transport systems.
Transit-oriented development
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Sustainable Living
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The authors investigate the impact of polycentric urban form and decentralized employment on residential location decisions and non-work motor vehicle travel. The authors first present empirically testable models of the interaction between urban form and motor vehicle travel demand drawn from urban economic theory. Then travel behavior responses are modeled at the household level using a dataset that combines tour-based activity-travel data with land-use measures at the United States Census block group level. The travel behavior data comes from a sample of 15,884 households from the Florida add-on version of the 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), as provided by the Florida Department of Transportation System Planning Office. Using geographic information system mapping software, the authors merge the NHTS data with parcel-level housing data to estimate accessibility measures. Preliminary findings provide evidence linking measures of polycentric urban form to changes in home-work commuter patterns and changes in non-work motor vehicle travel. The authors observe that residency status positively affects residential location choices, as indicated by selected residency tenure variables. Households residing in the State for less than two years have a 10-percent longer home-work commuting pattern. These households tend to have a more disperse activity space (a realization of the time-space prism), resulting in increased miles traveled and longer home-work distance. The combined effect of relocation patterns on the demand of travel results in an increase of about 21 percent in daily tour-level vehicle miles of travel and an increase of about 5.7 percent in the size of the activity space. These results provide evidence to support policies that would reduce the spatial allocation of activities and improve connectivity to other modes of transport at and around subcenters.
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Information on long distance travel is crucial for interregional and statewide travel forecasting. While long distance trips may account for a small percentage of total trips within a state, they produce an inordinate share of the statewide vehicle-miles of travel (VMT). For example, based on the daily diary information from the recent California Statewide Household Travel Survey (CSHTS), trips to locations more than 50 miles from travelers’ residences comprised about two percent of the total daily trip making, yet produced about 30 percent of the statewide VMT. While typical, one-day travel diaries can provide some useful information regarding long distance travel, they are an inefficient source of information for the detailed analysis of long distance travel. Since long distance travel is a relatively rare occurrence for most households–the average person makes approximately nine long distance round trips per year–most household will not report any long distance travel in a survey collecting travel data for a single travel day. In fact, only five percent of households participating in the CSHTS reported any long distance trips in their daily diaries. This paper describes how three recent surveys performed in California have been used to provide an overall picture of long distance travel within the state. The three surveys are the 2011 Harris On-Line Panel Long Distance survey performed for the California High Speed Rail Authority (CAHSRA) and the 2012-2013 California Statewide Household Travel Survey Daily Diary and Long Distance Travel Recall Surveys performed for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans).
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One of the solutions suggested for mitigating the detrimental effect of motor vehicles on society is to implement transit-oriented development (TOD). This type of development is intended to reduce automobile use and urban sprawl as well as to provide communities with more socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable neighborhoods that offer a variety of mobility choices. This study attempted to find out whether new residents adopted more sustainable modes of transportation after their relocation to a TOD. The analysis determined which factors influenced travel mode switching decisions by specifying a multilevel multinomial logistic regression model. Data for the analysis were drawn from a travel behavior survey conducted on residents in seven North American TODs in 2013. The results showed that newcomers adopted more sustainable travel modes for amenities and leisure trips after they relocated to a TOD but that they were less likely to do so for work and shopping trips. To encourage more sustainable travel modes, the study findings suggested that transit incentives coupled with workplace parking charges needed to be considered. Factors that were found to increase the probability that new TOD residents would switch to a more sustainable mode of transportation included their awareness of the environmental impact of each travel mode, the ease with which it was possible to walk through the neighborhood and to various destinations, and the proximity to transit stops. However, larger household size, homeownership, and the addition of a new car had negative impacts. The findings provided new insights into TOD planning and its link to travel behavior; these insights could benefit planners, engineers, and policy makers who have adopted the TOD approach to development with the goal of mitigating car usage.
Sustainable transport
Urban sprawl
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A considerable body of research on induced travel has emerged over the last several decades, and induced travel has been acknowledged by the U.S. Transportation Research Board and Environmental Protection Agency. This has brought renewed attention to the representation of induced travel in regional land use and travel demand models. A number of case studies (Sacramento, CA, Chittenden, VT, and Salt Lake City, UT) have assessed the ability of existing travel and land use models to represent the induced travel effects of new highway capacity (or elasticity of VMT with respect to lane miles and travel time). In addition, these studies have conducted sensitivity tests, by turning on and off model components, to isolate the relative contribution with respect to the models' representation of induced travel. The results indicate that when travel times are fed back to a land use model and/or the trip distribution step, then (1) models can represent induced travel within the range documented in the empirical literature and (2) the effect of new highway capacity on land use and trip distribution can significantly contribute to the model's representation of induced travel. If induced travel is not represented in travel and land use models, then the need for, and the benefit of, a highway project will tend to be overstated (e.g., 16% to 236% of vehicle hours traveled), and negative environmental effects will be understated (e.g., 72% to 192% of NOx vehicle emissions).
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Pressing questions of planning of the land in human settlements. The article discusses some of the problems of land use planning of settlements. Propose options to resolve them by improving the existing legislation in this area
Human settlement
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Sustainable transport
Mode choice
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Private transport
Travel survey
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