Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Accessibility to schools, especially prestigious ones, is often recognized as an important attribute that determines housing prices. It is usually cited as a major selling point for new housing developments in Singapore. This paper explores the relationship between accessibility to prestigious schools and the value of housing properties using a hedonic housing price model based on data drawn from the sales records of individual housing transactions in Singapore for $4\text{years}$ from 2000 to 2003. While traditional hedonic analyses have employed straight-line distance measurements to focal points such as the Central Business District, as an indicator of accessibility, this study employs accessibility measurements computed for zones where the properties are located. The findings indicate that the accessibility to prestigious schools does affect residential property price, and it significantly explains the variation in housing prices in Singapore. However, these are not valued as highly as other attributes, such as neighborhood prestige and tenure of the property. Sensitivity studies of housing prices show that the extent of the influence varies with distances to the Central Business District, school enrollment, and performance ranking.

Across the country, renewed public and private investment in urban areas is converting blighted neighborhoods into residential developments. An interesting question is what factors draw investors to areas that have been declining or are abandoned. The explosion of publicly available data on the Internet has made possible the examination of some of the factors that may contribute to an urban neighborhood’s revitalization or redevelopment. Using a database of information compiled from the City of St. Louis Community Information Network, this research sought to identify factors common to St. Louis neighborhoods where building activity was greatest in 1997, the most recent year for which building permit data were available.

Metropolitan Adelaide in Australia is dominated by low-density suburbs with an extensive and large road supply, which brings with it car-dependent lifestyles that are ultimately unsustainable in the longer term. Changes are needed to make a city such as Adelaide less car-dependent toward a city that relies on more sustainable transport modes for its day to day urban travel needs. This paper presents the results from a comparative study of travel patterns among residents of four suburban residential areas in metropolitan Adelaide. Using existing datasets together with inventory data of urban environment characteristics from original fieldwork, this paper examines to what extent there are associations between various attributes of a particular urban location as they relate to travel behavior and household socio-economics. The findings derived from multinomial logit models show that suburban development pattern and design attributes can potentially create shifts in transport modal split suggesting that microscale urban features should be given more attention in transport policy making.

This paper discusses a model for developing optimal integrated schedules for urban rail and feeder bus operation. It consists of two parts: train scheduling submodel and schedule coordination submodel, which are formulated as combinatorial type optimization problems. The objective function for train scheduling submodel is fixed as minimization of sum of operating cost of trains (operator cost) and total waiting time cost of passengers boarding the train (user costs) subject to load factor and waiting time constraint, whereas the objective function for schedule coordination submodel is fixed as minimization of sum of total operating cost of feeder buses (operator cost), total transfer time cost for passengers transferring from train to feeder buses, and total waiting time cost of passengers boarding enroute (user costs) subject to load factor and transfer time constraint. The coordination is done for two cases: Case 1 for mixed fleet buses, considering all types of buses; Case 2 for single-decker fleet buses, considering only standard single-decker buses, and the results are compared to adopt the best strategy. Thane City, which is a part of Mumbai Metropolitan Region, India, is taken as the case study area. The coordinated feeder bus schedules were found to be optimum for the mixed fleet bus case.

The island of Ortigia is a small extremity of the urban fabric of the city of Siracusa, located in the eastern part of Sicily. The island forms part of the historic city center and is characterized by its own particular urban configuration, representing a kind of “suburban historic center.” Apart from being the site of some central business district activities, it is particularly attractive to tourists for which reason it would be desirable to eliminate traffic from the island, as far as possible. An almost total closure to traffic was hypothesized and applied and a methodology was also developed, based on a random utility model for discrete user choice, thanks to surveys carried out among drivers. The model allowed a distribution mechanism of car-park use to be established on the basis of which a redefinition of parking fees was effected.

A procedure is developed to model network traffic for planning applications in small and/or medium-sized communities with limited planning resources. The proposed method is based on the theories and assumptions of conventional four-step travel demand models, but the baseline trip table is estimated from existing traffic counts using path flow estimator (PFE) to render a quick response approach that requires less data than the conventional approach. The proposed modeling approach is suitable for short-range, small area planning applications, such as the evaluation of alternative roadway networks that does not involve significant growth in trip generation patterns. A case study is set up with data from a small community (St. Helena, Calif.) to demonstrate the proposed approach. An $O\text{-}D$ trip table is estimated with PFE from traffic counts. The estimation process is shown to be feasible as the results matched observed data with a satisfactory error bound. The traffic impacts of various scenarios of land use and network changes can be effectively evaluated with the proposed modeling approach.

Due to the fact that manufacturing industries are moving further and further away, the separation of port and city plans, and consequently the competitiveness of Kaohsiung, compared to Hong Kong and Shanghai, is declining. The global logistics concept and organizational issues are the focus of a new proposal for urban development strategies for Kaohsiung. This research is aimed at the urban development and applies the global logistics system in the strategic formation of a future development plan for Kaohsiung. The evaluation result shows that six superior strategies were selected via a two-stage multiple objective evaluation method. The superior strategies include promoting integration of the urban renewal with the wharf redevelopment, speeding up the improvement of urban transportation, integrating the current maritime information network, and enhancing the twin-port functions. The evaluation method is workable when applied in the strategy evaluation for a large number of strategy cases.

Modeling consumer behavior in shopping streets to support urban planning decisions has a long tradition in a variety of disciplines. Surprisingly, temporal variation in such a shopping process has received only scant attention in these models. This paper therefore proposes a multinomial logit model, in which real time is part of the utility function, implying that temporal variation in consumer preference structures can be analyzed. A grid-based estimation procedure is developed to estimate the unknown temporal variability from consumer choice data. The goodness-of-fit of the estimated model is very satisfactory and most parameters are statistically significant and in anticipated directions. Time-varying effects on consumer behavior are shown to be fairly strong. Some factors are weakened over time while others are strengthened. This finding suggests the existence of systematic variations in consumer behavior, which could enable retailers, urban planners, and real estate developers to evaluate their plans or to make decisions in more specific spatio-temporal contexts.

While there is no standard definition for sustainable transportation, several adopted definitions reflect that a sustainable transportation system should be effective and efficient in providing safe and equitable access to basic economic and social services, promote economic development and support environmental integrity. Critical priorities, standards, and constraints for attaining sustainable transportation may be different, however, in different countries depending on prevailing socioeconomic conditions and political and administrative institutions. This study develops four case studies to characterize some of the major transportation system sustainability issues in developed and developing economies. The cases demonstrate that while transportation sustainability issues revolve around similar issues, the actual process of identifying and addressing pertinent issues to promote transportation system sustainability may involve widely different priorities and constraints that should influence how standards are developed to promote successful movement toward sustainability in the international community.