Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Active commuting to school has decreased in the last decades, replaced by motorized transportation and especially by the car. Beyond the environmental factors, the schools' territorial policies explain this trend. Drawing on a policy analysis and a survey of 1,495 parents carried out in 2007 in Montreal (1,297 parents) and Trois-Rivières, Canada (198 parents), this paper explores the relationship between active commuting and different school categories. The analysis shows important changes in schools’ service areas in a context of demographic change and institutional restructuring. Meaningful differences are observed between school categories in terms of mean home-school distance and modal share for commuting to school.

While much research has been devoted to analyzing the variation in transportation and land use model outputs due to uncertainty, little has been done to quantitatively answer the more important question of how decision making will change based on recognition of this uncertainty. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap by evaluating how roadway investment decisions will differ depending on whether or not uncertainty is recognized. Population and employment control totals, as well as trip generation and trip distribution parameters, are found via antithetic sampling, and a full feedback integrated gravity-based land use and four-step travel model is used. It is found that the ranking of improvement projects may indeed be different if uncertainty is considered relative to treating all parameters and data as deterministic. The experimental analysis conducted in this paper found this percent difference to be between 4 and 25% depending on the performance metric used: total system travel time, vehicle miles traveled, total delay, average network speed, and standard deviation of network speed were all examined.

City engineers and planners have a critical role to play in the advancement of sustainable transportation systems at the local level. Practices that promote water quality and/or public health through transportation infrastructure are two central components of this role. Yet, little is known about the decision processes local governments use to adopt these sorts of new practices. This study explores innovations related to sustainable transportation systems using the Kansas City, Missouri, metropolitan area. Interviews with engineers and planners reveal that the automobile still dominates planning and decision making. However, when water quality or public health goals come to the fore, important decision factors include the relative advantage and observability of the strategies themselves, leadership of elected officials and public works directors, perceptions of funding levels, educational opportunities provided by professional organizations, and federal mandates.

The importance of a transportation terminal’s transfer efficiency to passengers is well known. However, it is still a problem of how to combine the various indicators into a single indicator that can be used to quickly compare transportation terminals’ transfer efficiency and identify those terminals in need of intervention. This paper presents a study that is reflective of such an effort. Using the transfer data obtained from 10 transportation terminals in Beijing, the individual performance measures were combined into a single comprehensive measure through the data envelopment analysis (DEA). Efficiency is allowed to be measured by DEA when decision making units have multiple inputs and multiple outputs. The input variables are the transfer area, operating expense, (the number of) staff in the terminal and the capacity of buses. The output variables are measured by the transfer safety and average transfer time of all the transfer passengers. This paper gained the efficiency order of the 10 transportation terminals in Beijing, and provides the potential improvements of each efficiency indicators. The findings and limitations of DEA are also discussed.

Transportation agencies may review proposed projects that were not examined as part of the long range planning process. Typically, these projects require an immediate response and lack detailed data. This paper describes a methodology to assess such unplanned or “stand-alone” transportation projects and applies it to two case studies: a large development involving several major new highway sections and a pedestrian crossing of a four-lane arterial bisecting residential and commercial areas. The methodology specifies the trade-offs and uncertainties of the proposed stand-alone projects. For example, adding phasing to an existing signal resulted in a lower capital cost, and a lower feasibility of pedestrian use, than constructing an overpass. Yet, neither alternative assures crash risk is minimized because the extent of pedestrian compliance with traffic laws is not known. The outcome is thus a timely clarification of each alternative’s advantages which can be compared to existing policies. Limitations are the availability of site-specific knowledge, the willingness to articulate difficult choices that are clarified by this work, and the feasibility of fully considering cumulative impacts. However, by formalizing the analysis of stand-alone projects, the methodology strengthens the link between such incremental decision making and comprehensive long range planning.

The objective is to discover the current perception of vertical greenery systems and barriers to their widespread adoption in Singapore. It can be concluded that the energy saving property of vertical greenery systems make them suitable for the local conditions as Singapore depends heavily on air conditioning. In addition, vertical greenery systems will also enhance the aesthetic of a building. Moreover, the installation of vertical greenery system is part of the effort to reduce the increasing serious air and noise pollution. Lastly, vertical greenery system is able to bring nature closer to humans. As with all greenery, constant clearing of the residue of dead leaves as well as periodical replacement and trimming cannot be avoided. These may become a barrier in convincing building owners to adopt vertical greenery systems. Furthermore, there is a lack of technical information, maintenance instructions, and information on plants suitable for vertical greenery systems locally. Lastly, there is lack of awareness of the benefits and performance of vertical greenery systems as well as a lack of grants and subsidies for implementation of vertical greenery systems.

This study explores how transportation external cost pricing and transit fare reductions impact household mode/route choices and environmental improvements in a metropolitan area. A household mode/route choice model and a bilevel model for transportation external cost pricing and transit fare reductions are sequentially constructed. In the first level of bilevel model, the pricing of transportation external costs, including congestion, air pollution, and noise, is measured applying the theory of marginal-cost pricing. The effects of transportation external cost pricing are analyzed in terms of variations in household mode/route choices, increased patronage of rail transit lines and reduced congestion, air pollution, and noise. In the second level of bilevel model, this study explores how to reduce rail transit fares to achieve equivalent benefits of environmental improvement as for the strategy of transportation external cost pricing. The analytical results reveal that, after the implementation of transportation external cost pricing and taxation, the number of commuting households attracted to rail transit lines will increase, and some commuting households may detour to more distant transit stations to avoid high congestion links on surface streets.

The aim of this study was to show that the effect of a city with favorable characteristics for landscape and urban planning on urban versus rural temperature differences is lower by determining the distribution of daily mean, the maximum and minimum temperatures, and the extent of their differences in urban and rural areas of a small-size and unindustrialized Turkish city, Erzincan, which has favorable landscape and urban planning characteristics due to its reestablishment after a violent earthquake in 1992. With this aim, temperature data were obtained from urban and rural stations of the city and evaluated over a 10-year period (3,653 days from 1999 to 2008) and urban-rural differences of 0.8, 0.9, and $2.0°\text{C}$ were found in daily mean, maximum, and minimum temperatures, respectively, while the most prevalent range of these differences was determined to be $0.0–1.9°\text{C}$ over the study period. It was concluded in the study that in order to design more comfortable and livable urban environments, professionals should consider the population, industrial areas and traffic loads, green area amount and density, and form of buildings in a city and also lay emphasizes on the cautions through which they can create urban environments with less population and larger green areas, e.g., using green belts or constructing smaller suburban sites by separating commercial and industrial areas from housing sites in newly developing areas.

Contemporary urbanization, urban regionalization and modernization, and the globalized economy have resulted in the formation of various urban complexes that have attracted the attention of urban geographers, sociologists, and economists worldwide. Quantitative delimitation of metropolitan areas has laid a foundation for further study of such areas. This study was conducted to develop a method of quantifying metropolitan area delimitation based on a synthetic method in conjunction with the geographical information system (GIS) technology. In addition, these methods were applied to the Lanzhou metropolitan area according to the analysis of spatial attenuating tendency, economic gravity (EG), network, civil interests, and potential effect. To accomplish this, the ARC/INFO software was employed to establish an accurate and authentic database. This database was then used to investigate the relationships and interactions between urban and regional areas or interurban areas, which were reported as indices of the spatial factor, temporal factor, flow, and EG. The use of quantifying metropolis delimitation based on the synthetic method developed here and GIS technology was generally successful.

Land use/land cover (LULC) change with urbanization affects urban heat island (UHI). We selected the Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper images for year 2005 to retrieve land surface temperature (LST) and LULC types and assess the correlation between LULC and LST pattern in Nanjing, China. Daytime mean LST of LULC types in the metropolitan area decreases from industrial, high-density residential commercial, pavement roads, low-density residential commercial, and rural residential to water. UHI centers (over $20.18°\text{C}$ ) are located in two big stations, Zhonghua-Men Old City and main industrial zones. LULC pattern generally accords with UHI pattern and affects UHI pattern by artificial heat sources and thermal-biological variations of surface materials. The LST-NDVI index of pavement roads, high-density residential-commercial, rural residential, industrial, low-density residential commercial, forest grass, cultivated, and water body are 0.01, 0.101, 0.151, 0.262, 0.324, 0.987, 1.647, and 0.765, respectively. The ${\text{LST}}_{\text{FD}}$ of profiles varies with landscape diversity and spatial difference. The ${\text{LST}}_{\text{STDEV}}$ of LULC types varies with different spatial scales and selected profiles. Results enlighten us on designing open space in local scale to mitigate the UHI effect.

Urban populations in Turkey have been growing steadily since the 1950s. As such, adequately supplying development parcels for the growing population is one of the most important responsibilities of the local governments, primarily by preparing and implementing development plans. The tools most widely used in this implementation include expropriation, voluntary application and land readjustment (LR). LR provides efficient implementations both for government and landowners when compared to expropriation and voluntary application. However, Turkish LR bears a number of weaknesses that must be addressed in order to facilitate widespread use. This paper discusses the importance of the LR method in implementation of the development plans in Turkey. Furthermore, it introduces Turkish LR method, including its primary principles and implementation phases. It concludes with the strengths and weaknesses of the method and such proposals as encouraging voluntary LR applications, providing landowners’ participation in the projects, carrying out the projects based on the value instead of the area, introducing legal sanctions to provide developments after the LR implementations, constructing a web-based platform to share the experiences gained in different projects, and using Geographical Information System technologies to improve overall implementation of the LR projects.