Promoting Transportation Sustainability by Utilizing Available Roadway Capacity

Abstract

Land use changes affect travel demand, resulting in the need to expand transportation infrastructure. Unfortunately, an inevitable consequence of urban sprawl, the spreading of a city to suburbs and outskirts, is the creation of auto-dependent development. Land use models forecast without considering underutilized roadways leading to urban sprawl. Any change in travel cost or detrimental growth pattern does not have any significant influence on future land use or location choice of future household and employment. This study addresses urban sprawl and available capacity utilization and combines those features with land use change model for planning more compact cities. This research conducted a rigorous step by step analysis to determine a better solution that results in more trips inside a case study community. Based on minimizing vehicle mileage traveled (VMT) and the number of congested links, a preferred scenario was identified that is one of the major contributions of this exploration. Hence, it is a preliminary initiative to promote transportation sustainability and build compact cities using current resources instead of the planning of future road network solely depending on the land use forecast model.