Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

In the aftermath of recent hurricanes, many people either died or were stranded in the affected areas due to lack of time for evacuation caused by traffic congestion on evacuation routes. The main sources of traffic congestion are the unnecessary evacuation of the areas located outside evacuation zones as well as early evacuation of the less dangerous areas. In this paper, a set of evacuation zones is defined to prioritize the evacuation based on the danger level in the impact areas during a hurricane landfall. A clustering analysis approach is used to formulate this problem and is solved using dynamic programming. The proposed approach is examined on a case study in Harrison County, Mississippi, to prove its applicability.

The land-use mix observed in the smaller Indian cities is peculiar, and in this context there were no past studies on how the land-use mix influences the travel pattern. The existing indices used for quantifying the land-use mix were found to have limitations in capturing the characteristics of land-use mix observed in the smaller Indian cities. The present study analyzed the drawbacks and limitations of the existing indices and modified the dissimilarity and entropy indices, as well as formulated new indices suitable to quantify the mixed land use. The objectives behind the mix quantification were to capture the land-use balance, land-use mix, and land-use complementarity. The modified dissimilarity and entropy indices were found to be significant in explaining the variation in the trip lengths as well as preference toward nonmotorized transport (NMT). Proposed new parameters such as the area index and mix-type index were found to be significant in explaining the variability observed in the trip length and the nonmotorized mode choice. From the elasticity analysis it has been observed that a slight change in the land-use mix significantly affects the travel patterns. Further, from the estimated multinomial logit (MNL) models it has been observed that the mixed land-use parameter was found to be significant in explaining the choice of public transport and nonmotorized modes.

This study examines equity in public transit finance for transit service among nine cities and townships that formed a consortium for regional transit service in Toledo, Ohio, in 2006. The main data for the analysis—operating and financial data of fixed-route bus and demand-responsive services and data on local property tax receipts—were obtained from the transit agency, as well as the National Transit Database. The analysis results show that the distribution of costs and benefits of transit subsidy was progressive among sociodemographic groups while it exhibited geographic inequity, and suggest that it is inevitable to find a conflict between social equity and geographic equity in public transit finance within urban areas where transit dependents remain in inner cities while regional transit funding has to rely more on taxes provided by affluent suburban communities. The shrinking role of federal and state governments in public transit assistance exacerbated this conflicting situation by reducing funding that could be used to enhance transit service in each community.

This paper presents a decision-tree based model to forecast rail transit ridership at the station level according to the surrounding land-use patterns. The canonical correlation analysis (CCA) method is used to identify key land use variables by evaluating their degrees of contribution to the rail transit station demand, which can effectively reduce dimensionality and complexity of the decision tree. A full month of Smart Card data and detailed regulatory land use plan from Chongqing, China are collected for model development and validation. The proposed model offers the capability of targeting key lane use patterns and associating them with rail transit station boarding and alighting demand at a high level of accuracy. The proposed model can reveal underlying rules between rail transit station demand and land use variables, and can be used to assist in developing the Transit Oriented Development (TOD) plans to improve land use and transit operational efficiency.

As a mass transit mode, the metro attracts passengers from a vast area around its stations through various feeding modes such as walking and cycling. This catchment area is important in interchange planning, transit integration and implementation, and demand forecasting, but the conventional airline buffer greatly overestimates the service area. Moreover, other access modes such as cycling and bus have seldom been considered. It is significant to delineate service areas for multiple modes using the network distance. To this end, an approach of determining the access distances and delineating the service coverage for metro stations was established for multiple feeding modes using a network approach. The proposed method was applied to the Beijing metro based on a large survey sample of trip origins. Data on more than four thousand metro trips were collected in a field survey, and the trip origins were retrieved and visualized in a geographic information system (GIS). Using the geocoded information of the metro, bus lines, and road networks of Beijing, the trip distances were calculated for the corresponding networks for all of the trips investigated. The shares of access modes and the distributions of access distances were analyzed. The service areas of all the metro stations were delineated for each mode and visualized in the downtown and suburban areas through a network analysis. The possible applications of the geocoded service areas drawn in this work, such as optimizing the location of the interchange facilities and boosting the cooperation of different transit modes, are discussed.

Sustainability assessment in transportation planning and selection of the best transportation mode among alternatives is a challenging process. The technological differences among conventional, hybrid, and alternative fuel vehicles and buses, the large number of variables in the sustainability assessment of transportation systems, and the subjective judgment of decision makers introduce uncertainty. The objective of this paper is thus twofold: (1) to demonstrate a sustainability framework that focuses specifically on vehicle characteristics and (2) to compare two multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods in terms of ranking sustainability performance of transportation vehicles and applicability to selected indicators. The two most widely adopted MCDM methods for decision making were used, the weighted sum method for its simplicity and the fuzzy logic method for its ability to incorporate imprecise and vague information. The assessment includes five vehicle types and various mode share scenarios. The results from the two methods were compared by using traffic composition data by vehicle technology from a 33.2-km (20.6-mi) network in urban Honolulu. Both methods provided vehicle rankings on a continuous scale and integrate vehicle technology and fuel characteristics in the assessment. The differences between the two methods appear to be systematic with the weighted sum method generating results with greater fluctuations. The fuzzy logic method is more stable. It is also more flexible because it is capable of incorporating quantitative and qualitative judgment criteria.

This paper examines features, patterns, and driving forces of urban expansion in a urban-mining composited zone from 1986 to 2013 with geographical information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS). Urban land information was extracted from remote sensing images of 1986, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2009, and 2013 to analyze the variation characteristics of urban land in quantity and spatial distribution. Expansion intensity, barycenter of urban land, and urban compactness are usedto analyze the expansion features of urban land over 27 years, describe the expansion types in each period, and discuss the expansion pattern. Additional analyses are conducted to determine the driving forces of urban expansion. The research results are as follows. Firstly, the area of urban land presented a trend of linear increase, with the expansion intensity index indicating a trend of exponential growth, and gentle expansion alternating with dramatic expansion. Secondly, urban land sprawled in a distinct concentric pattern around one center at first and two centers later. Thirdly, there were five expansion types during the 27 years, including westward-slow-concentrated expansion, westward-slow-scattered expansion, eastward-moderate-scattered expansion, eastward-moderate-concentrated expansion, and westward-dramatic-scattered expansion. Finally, the compactness of urban land fluctuated in 1986–2013, which implies that internal enrichment expansion and external extending appeared alternately. Furthermore, by analyzing natural and social economic data, four factors are considered as driving forces of urban expansion in Pingshuo mining area of China: limitation from landform, relative policies, increase of economy, and the development of mining area. Urban expansion and mining activities have resulted in dramatic landscape changes, which are studied by five landscape metrics. This study provides a typical case of urban expansion in an urban mining composited zone, and the findings can help provide better understanding of the process and mechanism of urban expansion in this kind of area.

During disruption of rail transit operation at one or more stations, bus bridging evacuation refers to dispatching buses from predesignated depots to travel back and forth between the disrupted metro stations and the turnover stations to carry affected passengers. This paper presents a nonlinear integer programing model to best plan the bus bridging evacuation in both upstream and downstream directions along a rail transit line during disruption. A customized genetic algorithm (GA) with a specially designed mutation mechanism is designed to solve the model efficiently. Case studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the model.

The essentials of regional development forecasting are freely addressed in existing multidimensional approaches. Nowadays, despite the convenience of high-quality data, enhanced tools, and equipment that provide a good degree of realism in forecasting, the doors are open to confusion primarily because of the difficulty in appreciating such a large number of concepts, models, and experimental details. Based on this issue and practical examples, this paper presents common essentials in a demand-supply allocation model for regional development forecasting.

The State of Maryland aims to double its transit ridership by the end of 2020. The Maryland Statewide Transportation Model (MSTM) has been used to analyze different policy options at a system-wide level. Direct ridership models (DRMs) estimate ridership as a function of station environment and transit service features rather than using mode-choice results from large-scale traditional models. They have been particularly favored for estimating the benefits of smart growth policies such as transit-oriented development (TOD) on transit ridership and can be used as complements to the traditional four-step models for analyzing smart-growth scenarios at a local level. They can also provide valuable information that a system-level analysis cannot provide. For example, DRMs can provide ridership estimate when densifying either households or employment at certain stations to test the effectiveness of TOD strategies at target stations. In this study, the authors developed DRMs of rail transit stations, namely light rail, commuter rail, Baltimore metro, and Washington DC Metro for the State of Maryland. Data for 112 rail stations were gathered from a variety of sources and categorized by transit service characteristics, station built-environment features, and social-demographic variables. The results suggest that impacts of the built environment differ for light rail and commuter rail. For light rail stations, employment at 0.8 km (half-mile) station areas, service level, feeder bus connectivity, station location in the Central Business District (CBD), distance to the nearest station, and terminal stations are significant factors influencing ridership. For commuter rail stations, only feeder bus connections are found to be significant. The DRM results have implications for agencies aiming to increase transit ridership through leveraging the land use near transit-station areas. The results show that stations with higher employment were observed to have higher transit boardings. Thus, agencies desiring to increase transit ridership should consider zoning regulations and site-design requirements that allow denser development around transit stations. However, increasing densities must be in conjunction with improved transit service levels, parking, and feeder bus services to take full advantage of rail transit. Some of the limitations of the current study and future research directions Include, first, that the DRMs were developed for the State of Maryland only. Future research should be carried out for surrounding regions to get generalized conclusions. Second, other important factors should be incorporated in the model, such as safety and transit reliability attributes. Third, more-detailed parking information, such as parking costs and supply, should be included in the model.

This study investigates the urbanization of Taihu Basin and its influence on Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT)-Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The correction model of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) of nighttime images was built to extract the dynamics of urban expansion. Tempo-spatial correlations between a vegetation index and nighttime light intensity are discussed to quantitatively assess the urbanization effect. The results show that Taihu Basin is in a period of rapid urbanization. Urban expansion is developing not only surrounding the city center circle but also along the main traffic arteries and rivers, which show a linear expansion resulting in an urban agglomeration. Under the influence of urbanization, the NDVI shows a slight decrease, and there is a significant negative tempo-spatial correlation in the urban areas of the eastern watershed between NDVI and nighttime light intensity, which are predominantly the low vegetation abundant areas. The contribution of urbanization to NDVI is negative in the eastern region. The contribution rates are greater than 14.0% and, in some cases, exceed 30%. This paper indicates the urbanization characteristics and their effect on the surface vegetation in Taihu Basin. In addition, based on the calibration model, the DMSP-OLS nighttime light data have a strong ability to examine the spatiotemporal evolution of urbanization. The results can provide support for the study of urban hydrology.

Bicycle facilities are commonly invested in to reduce vehicle congestion, mitigate vehicle emissions, and promote physical activity by increasing the number of bicycle trips and reducing the number of vehicle trips. Although there has been a large amount of behavioral and observational research on bicyclists’ route and facility preferences and the traveling public’s mode choice decisions, there is surprisingly little evidence on the effectiveness of bicycle facilities in increasing the share of bicycling relative to vehicle use. Using a stated-preference survey, this study finds that more than two-thirds of current bicycle facility users in Albuquerque, New Mexico, would continue to bicycle, and nearly one-third would discontinue bicycling, if the bicycle facilities they regularly use did not exist. The most common alternative would be driving a car. The findings suggest that bicycle facilities can increase bicycle mode share and reduce driving by influencing the mode choice decisions of certain individuals—namely, those with the least bicycling experience. Bicycle facilities may therefore play an important role in building new bicyclist confidence.

Rural areas support urban areas by preserving natural environments such as forests and agricultural food products. However, because of urbanization after the high-growth period, the ecological balance has deteriorated because of land development, abandonment of cultivation, automobile dependency, and similar factors. This study assessed an improved method of calculating the ecological footprint (EF) value, which assigns a rating for environmental balance in rural areas. Residents’ consumption is calculated based on the environmental load (cultivation, ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ emission, and similar loads) that residents generate during daily life activities. A case study of Tsukuba city in Ibaraki Prefecture reveals a wide distribution of traditional settlements for which this system can determine the environmental balance. Analysis of the case study shows: (1) environmental productivity and consumption capacity differed greatly according to the advancement of urban development, and (2) only a few settlements, located in forested areas, are ecologically balanced.

For fast-growing cities in developing countries, population distribution is significantly affected by a candidate rail transit line. To enjoy the travel convenience of rail service, households would like to move into residential locations in the candidate rail transportation corridor. Meanwhile, while more households are attracted to live in the candidate rail transportation corridor over years, the over-year performance of the candidate rail transit line would be better. That is, interaction exists between population distribution and performance of the candidate rail transit line over years. Unfortunately, the over-year interaction between population distribution and performance of the candidate rail transit line was seldom considered in previous studies. This paper tries to bridge this research gap and presents analytical forecasting of population distributions over years in a new candidate rail transportation corridor. A bilevel mathematical model is proposed, with a lower-level problem formulated as a user-equilibrium model, and an upper-level problem formulated as an over-year rail transit line design model. Finally, a numerical example is given to show the application of the proposed model.

Since the proposition of compact city theory, the sustainability of the compact city and whether it represents an appropriate orientation for urban development have been heatedly discussed. How urban compactness will affect resource utilization and environmental pollution is still unknown. By fully considering the core connotations of the compact city, a comprehensive evaluation indicator system was established to measure the compactness of 35 major cities in China in 2000 and 2010. The results showed the prevalence of urban sprawl. Multiple linear regression was employed to investigate the relationship between urban compactness and resource consumption and pollutant discharges in China. The results indicated that compact urban development can promote a more efficient utilization of urban resources with no obvious impact on the urban environment, especially in the reduction of pollutant emissions.

Urban planners in China often face major challenges when developing or revising their city master plan in accordance with sustainability principles. They are very much trapped between policies and guidelines issued by the government and a market economy controlled by developers. The government has issued some overall recommendations for establishing eco-cities in China built on resource efficiency principles, but they lack more hands-on guidelines to be used by urban planners. Several of the most well-known eco-city projects have also encountered difficulties in the implementation phase. One problem is that the frameworks have not been developed bottom-up in a local participation process but have mainly been imported from other projects, in several cases from international experiences. This creates a gap between planning and implementation. The traditional way of planning in China is done in a sectoral way. That is, different sectors, like transport, energy, water, waste, and environment, are planned separately. This is also reflected in the lack of cooperation between the different city departments and companies responsible for energy, water, and transport. The overall aim of this study was to develop and test a new simplified framework that can guide urban planners when developing the master plan for a city or a city area aiming at becoming an eco-city. The framework developed was applied in devising a more comprehensive and integrated plan for the city of Xuzhou based on cross-sectoral planning. Meeting the future challenges of a growing population and consumption of a third planning level, the 3R level, is proposed in this paper. This is in line with a growing skepticism towards the belief in ecological modernization. In order to avoid the problem of finding exact definitions for concepts, such as sustainability and eco-city as used in China, an approach with three levels of ambition for sustainability and sustainable development was adopted. Each level of ambition requires different planning approaches related to sectoral, cross sectoral, and 3R planning. The framework will next be refined and applied in other eco-city projects in China.

Rapid population growth and population concentration in urban areas, especially in cities of developing countries, has brought about many problems, and the sustainable urban development paradigm has introduced compact cities as one of the solutions for future urban forms. Although discussions about compact form characteristics and its dimensions have a long history in the literature in developed countries, but they have not been considered much in developing countries such as Iran. Therefore, this research attempts to survey this phenomenon in Iran’s midsized cities, to identify compactness factors and to measure this concept using a quantifiable method that could be replicable in other cities in developing countries. Four factors are identified from the literature review to depict compactness: density, mixed land uses, accessibility, and centrality. Indicators depicting these components of urban compactness are extracted from the literature and adapted to local conditions and characteristics. National population and housing census and also local master as well as detailed plans are used, through commercially available software, to obtain the needed data for these indicators. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to measure the different components of urban compaction. Exploratory factors analysis is used to verify the significance of the preidentified compaction dimensions in showing the compactness of the three midsized cities in Iran. This issue is examined for the three midsized cities of Qazvin, Kashan, and Gorgan. The results show that density, mixed use, and centrality factors are statistically significant dimensions of urban compactness phenomena in all three cities studied.

Sustainable cities normally have numerous urban environments that are not merely dominated by private vehicles but aim to promote pedestrian mobility, cycling routes, and public transport systems. Regulating the use of automobiles and providing efficient public transport options are essential in designing a city to move from car dependency to gradual restructuring of both locally and regionally peripheries, thus freeing up spaces for other potential uses such as ecological landscaping and food production within the city environments and as well as providing better-quality living environments. Transportation problems intensify significantly when infrastructure cannot operate efficiently with the increasing demand of commuters. The transportation system of the city of Mumbai, as the financial capital of India, is selected as a case study for the authors to review and analyze different aspects of sustainability on one basis of transportation. Through critical analysis of Mumbai’s transportation system, a methodology emerges to understand the parameters of a sustainable transportation system. Furthermore, this paper offers a guideline plan with a suggestion of a timeframe (i.e., short-term to long-term), a diagrammatic model including sociospatial, economic, and policy approaches, and a list of parameters for consideration with suggestions for implementation at both policy and practice levels.

Investigating urban structures based on the intrametropolitan location of economic activities (e.g., industrial districts or industrial clusters) is an increasingly important theme in empirical metropolitan studies. However, the lack of an adequate research methodology and theoretical foundations has restricted the in-depth examination of underlying mechanisms that form metropolitan industrial clusters, especially when considering the differentiated roles played by two key processes: localization economies and interindustry linkages. This paper proposes an approach to systematically examining and detecting the clustering of economic activities within a metropolitan area using the city of Shenyang as a case study. The present study was based on census data, which enumerated the number of firms by economic sector at the city block level. Analytical results revealed that geographic clusters were formed by interindustry linkages. Results from applying the sectoral geographic clustering model suggested that water conservancy, environmental protection and public facilities management, healthcare and social welfare, and public management and organizations seemed to follow the formation of intracity industrial clusters at the city block level. The central business district in Shenyang offers many services to manufacturing sectors and thus plays an important role in the location of manufacturing activities. Manufacturing locations, in turn, strongly affected how the transportation, warehousing, and postal locations and networks were formulated. Overall, the spatial organization of economic activity in the Shenyang metropolitan area can be characterized as having the structure of a focal core and peripheral areas. The large-scale decentralization and polynucleation of economic activities are not apparent within the metropolitan area. The outcome of applying the presented model shows that it has great potential for understanding intracity urban forms.

Land use is a key component to the sustainability of a city. Land-use planning policy should not be based solely on the hard figures, but also needs observational insights. Existing assessment methods and corresponding indexes may not provide comprehensive evaluation on sustainability practices. Therefore, a qualitative, comprehensive method is required to supplement sustainable land-use evaluation. This study developed a comprehensive evaluation framework embracing views from experts and the public for assessing land-use sustainability and applied it to the case of Hong Kong. Experts were interviewed to explain the relationship between land-use transition and impact factors, and through questionnaire survey, residents provided their ranking scores on the economic, environmental, and social performances to land-use change. A subsequent investigation was then conducted to understand/validate the different opinions given by experts and residents on sustainability. Finally, according to the questionnaire, survey, and supplementary investigation, the evaluation results were calculated and public evaluation criteria were formulated. The result also shows that Hong Kong’s land-use change in 2000–2010 is only marginally sustainable, with Open space to the best and decreased Grassland to the worst. The primary criteria of public requirement in economic, environmental, and social aspects are promoted productivity and labor force, extended natural space, and available resources. The proposed qualitative evaluation framework could be used to obtain the public view on the whole city’s land-use performance, providing new perspectives for planners and decision makers to move a city toward more sustainable land use by mitigating negative impacts, encouraging the most sustainable land-use, and balancing economic, environmental, and social effects. In addition, criteria for land-use assessment developed from a new perspective can be applied in China’s urban systems for sustainability assessment.