Does metropolitan form affect transportation sustainability? Evidence from US metropolitan areas
Name
Does Metro Form Affect Transportation Sustainability_Preprint.pdf
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438.8 KB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Sevtuk, Andres
Amindarbari, Reza
Date Issued
December 2020
Journal
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
Sevtuk, Andres and Reza Amindarbari. "Does metropolitan form affect transportation sustainability? Evidence from US metropolitan areas." Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science (December 2020): dx.doi.org/10.1177/2399808320971310
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
In this paper, we examine transportation sustainability in American metropolitan areas using transportation-related CO₂ emissions, public transit accessibility, and commuting times as indicators. Though variations in these indicators may stem from historic contexts, policies, institutional arrangements, social and cultural origins, the spatial structure of metropolitan areas—in particular their formal characteristics—may also be a contributing factor. To test this relationship, we identify metropolitan form metrics from prior literature that are expected to impact transportation outcomes, and choose five metrics to which we introduce significant improvements. We apply the metrics to all 166 Combined Statistical Areas in the US, using an open-source GIS toolbox released along with the paper. Our findings demonstrate that form-based metrics provide a better explanation to CO₂ emissions, public transit accessibility, and commuting times in US metro areas than the simpler population size or density metrics typically used in practice. We also show that counter to prior literature on urban scaling laws and economies of scale, which have argued that larger cities and metro areas are more sustainable per capita, transport-related CO₂ emissions and transit accessibility are actually less favorable in larger CSAs when controlling for formal characteristics of metropolitan areas. Instead of scale, compactness has the highest elasticity with respect to transportation sustainability of metro areas.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808320971310
