Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Motorized automobility and suburban living are not only highly valued but are also associated with a range of serious social problems, including deaths and injuries of motor-vehicle users and nonusers, roadway congestion, air pollution, dependence on insecure oil supplies, community fragmentation, and climate change. However, these problems, which make the present transportation and land-use system unsustainable, are not necessary consequences of automobility and suburban living per se, but rather are attributable mainly to the high kinetic energy of fast, heavy-motor vehicles (FHVs). Therefore, the challenge in creating a sustainable transportation and land-use system is to dramatically lower the kinetic energy of personal travel while retaining the advantages of personal motorized automobility and low-density development. Our approach is to redefine the technical artifact that is the conventional automobile and create two autonomous and universally accessible travel networks at a citywide scale: one for FHVs, the other for low-speed, low-mass modes including walking, cycling, and a new class of motor vehicles. In this paper, we motivate the need for this new urban-settlement and transportation-infrastructure scheme (USATIS), describe its design principles and features, review aspects of it in the literature and in the real world, present analyses covering a wide range of sustainability criteria—safety, mobility, congestion, environmental and energy-use impacts, urban aesthetics and community fragmentation, and economics—and discuss challenges for implementation and future research. We conclude that our USATIS does have the potential to support sustainable transportation without making people drive less or give up suburban living, but that before practical implementation plans can be considered, more research needs to be done on how people will adapt to the opportunities and constraints in the proposal.

Although extensive research has investigated how the built environment near people’s homes and work places influence automobile travel behavior, little is known about how commuting routes affect travel outcomes. This article presents a methodology that addresses this question by examining the correlation between built environment along commuting routes and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and fuel consumption for nonwork automobile travel. Using a global positioning systems (GPS) data set collected from automobile trips of 46 drivers from the southeast Michigan area over a 30-day time frame, this study identifies the actual commuting routes for all drivers and derives their fuel consumption for nonwork travel. Although statistically significant relationships are not found between route environments and nonwork VMT and fuel consumption, this study is unique in its focus on the commuting routes and in establishing a methodology for using GPS data in transportation and land-use research, and it offers suggestions for refining the modeling of travel behavior along commuting routes.

Transportation investments are nearing $1,000 per capita annually in the USA, and the Highway Trust Fund has been depleted. Such significant investments and budget-constrained contexts demand careful decision-making and thoughtful cost-benefit analyses. A project evaluation toolkit has been developed for comprehensive assessment of network expansion and pricing projects with only project expenditures, link attributes, and traffic counts as required inputs. The toolkit uses a self-contained travel demand model to predict future and alternative scenario traffic volumes, speeds, crash counts, emissions, and toll revenues while providing project-summary measures, including net present value and benefit-cost ratios. The toolkit seeks to provide early assessment of major project plans along abstracted networks, using hundreds of coded links (rather than thousands), providing results in a matter of minutes (rather than days). This paper describes the model and develops two case-study sites, each with several alternative scenarios. The first examines capacity expansion projects along a highly congested link on the periphery of Austin, Texas, while the second focuses on strategies to reduce traffic in central Austin through tolling and capacity-reduction projects. Toolkit results show which projects merit further consideration by summarizing and monetizing impacts across scenarios.

Gentrification is a well-known Western phenomenon involving the upgrading of urban areas, where economic forces compel the original inhabitants to be displaced by a wealthier group of people. Evidence of the gentrification process has been witnessed recently in Shanghai, which is a special case as the state has extended preferential policies not yet enjoyed elsewhere in China. This paper examines a more typical Chinese conurbation, that of the inner city of Yuexiu in Guangzhou, to provide an example of the characteristics of the emerging gentrification generally in China today. Some stylized characteristics are witnessed in several parts of the inner city. Several distinctive features regarding gentrifiers are also observed that are significantly related to the Chinese socialist market economy. The findings in general correspond well with the Shanghai studies in that gentrification is a chance happening that occurs as a result of extensive, new-build residential redevelopment. However, the result is not associated with a declining inner-city region, as has happened in the West, but rather has emerged in a still vibrant old urban center and exists as small-scale, residential-related gentrification rather than commercial gentrification.

This paper reports on the design and implementation of an internet-based survey that focuses on household activity scheduling in Cairo, Egypt. The survey is referred to as Internet-based daily activity scheduling of household activities (IDASHA). The main emphasis of the survey was on different types of household interactions and coordination over a multiple-day period. The survey also collected detailed information about information and communication technology (ICT) usage and the role that telecommunications play in household interactions in the planning and scheduling process. The survey was conducted over one week during the months of March to May 2009. The final sample size included 42 households of married couples (i.e., 84 adults). The survey was evaluated according to several criteria, and was shown to provide a rich source of data while minimizing the burden on the survey respondents. Moreover, statistical analyses were carried out to investigate several issues such as time allocation behavior, weekly household interactions in activity participation, and the development of a horizon index that shows how far ahead in time an event was planned. Basic need activities, work, and household obligation activities were found to have the highest portion of time at both the daily and weekly levels. However, there was a significant difference in the mean episode duration of these three groups of activities. According to the activity location, in-home activity episodes were found to be usually short, yet occupying a large portion of time per day. Out-of-home activities, however, had longer durations but were much less frequent than in-home activities. As for the companion type in joint activity participation, joint activities with only household members were shown to be more frequent than other participation types. In contrast, the activities performed with nonhousehold members were, on average, longer but much less frequent than those done alone or with household members.