TITLE:
Promoting Transportation Sustainability by Utilizing Available Roadway Capacity
AUTHORS:
Tahmina Khan, Michael Anderson, Aschalew Kassu
KEYWORDS:
Sustainability, Land-Use Change Model, Urban Sprawl Indices, Traffic Analysis Zone, Planning Scenarios, Compact City
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.6 No.4,
December
14,
2018
ABSTRACT:
Land use changes affect travel demand, resulting in the need to expand
transportation infrastructure. Unfortunately, an inevitable consequence of
urban sprawl, the spreading of a city to suburbs and outskirts, is the creation
of auto-dependent development. Land use models forecast without considering
underutilized roadways leading to urban sprawl. Any change in travel cost
or detrimental growth pattern does not have any significant influence on future
land use or location choice of future household and employment. This
study addresses urban sprawl and available capacity utilization and combines
those features with land use change model for planning more compact cities.
This research conducted a rigorous step by step analysis to determine a better
solution that results in more trips inside a case study community. Based on
minimizing vehicle mileage traveled (VMT) and the number of congested
links, a preferred scenario was identified that is one of the major contributions
of this exploration. Hence, it is a preliminary initiative to promote
transportation sustainability and build compact cities using current resources
instead of the planning of future road network solely depending on the land
use forecast model.