The nature and form of the urban environment is a critical determinant of the sustainability of our society, as it is responsible directly for a large proportion of consumed energy, and influences indirectly the patterns and modes of energy consumed in everyday activities. We examine the current state of research into the energy and greenhouse gas emissions attributable directly or indirectly to urban form. Specifically, we look at the embodied (construction) and operational energy attributable to the construction, maintenance and use of residential dwellings, and we review the literature on the relationship between urban structure and transport related energy consumption. While there is clear evidence from both intra and inter city comparisons that higher density, transit oriented cities have lower percapita transport energy use, the effect of housing density on residential (in-house) energy use is less clear. More detailed research is needed to examine the relationships between urban form and overall energy use. * Corresponding Author: peter.rickwood@gmail.com (ph: 02 9514 8606) 1 In this article, we discuss delivered energy, primary energy, and greenhouse gas emissions attributable to energy use. We asssume readers are aware of the relationship between these measures.
The 21 st century promises some dramatic changes-some expected, others surprising. One of the more surprising changes is the dramatic peaking in car use and an associated increase in the world's urban rail systems. This paper sets out what is happening with the growth of rail, especially in the traditional car dependent cities of the US and Australia, and why this is happening, particularly its relationship to car use declines. It provides new data on the plateau in the speed of urban car transportation that supports rail's increasing role compared to cars in cities everywhere, as well as other structural, economic and cultural changes that indicate a move away from car dependent urbanism. The paper suggests that the rise of urban rail is a contributing factor in peak car use through the relative reduction in speed of traffic compared to transit, especially rail, as well as the growing value of dense, knowledge-based centers that depend on rail access for their viability and cultural attraction. Finally, the paper suggests what can be done to make rail work better based on some best practice trends in large cities and small car dependent cities.
Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require rapid decarbonisation of the world's electricity and transport systems. This must occur against a background of continuing urbanisation and the shift to the information economy. While replacement of fossil fuels in electricity generation is underway, urban transport is currently dominated by petrol and diesel-powered vehicles. The City of the Future will need to be built around a different transport and urban paradigm. This article argues that the new model will be a polycentric city linked by fast electric rail, with local access based on autonomous "community"-owned electric cars and buses supplemented by bicycles, electric bikes and scooters, with all electricity generated from renewables. Less space will be wasted on roads and parking, enabling higher accessibility yet more usable public open space. Building the cities of the future will require national governments to accelerate local initiatives through appropriate policy settings and strategic investment. The precise way in which individual cities move into the future will vary, and the article illustrates how the transformation could work for Australian cities, like Sydney, currently some of the most car dependent in the world, using new financial and city partnerships.
Perth’s new
Studies looking at the relationship between urban form and travel behaviour have generally considered spatial information on coarse metropolitan or local government area scales. We analyse ABS Census data at the Collection District level for the metropolitan areas of the mainland Australian state capital cities, and at various spatial scales for an in-depth analysis of commuting in Sydney. The analyses suggest that the relationship between travel behaviour and urban form is complex, and that simple analyses of density alone are likely to overstate the effect of both metropolitan and neighbourhoodscale population density on mode choice, but that these variables serve as useful proxies for more complex measures of urban structure. IntroductionThere has been much interest by urban researchers in a variety of disciplines on the relationship between urban form and travel behaviour. The quantity of research in this area is large enough to support large bodies of work investigating (and often advocating) plans and policies to influence urban travel behaviour. For example, research indicating that higher population density, mixed land use, and transit provision result in significant shifts in travel behaviour has been the ammunition for those arguing for urban planning policies that favour higher-density development around public transport nodes (Cervero and Kockelman, 1997;Newman and Kenworthy, 1999). The motivation for such urban compaction is often environmental, although social, health, economic and aesthetic concerns are also cited (Newman and Kenworthy, 1989;Frumkin et al., 2004). Such policies, however, have not had unequivocal support, either in the research community (Troy, 1996;Levinson and Kumar, 1997;Holloway and Bunker, 2005), or amongst the general urban citizenry.The principal aim of this article is not to advocate for or against particular planning policies, as there is an extensive literature on this already 1 . Instead, we will give a brief overview pointing to some of the major relevant publications on both sides, and then proceed with our more descriptive task -conducting an analysis of how spatial structure affects journey-to-work travel behaviour in contemporary Australian cities. We take a spatially disaggregated approach, but without adopting anything as sophisticated as the discrete choice model backed random utility framework typical in modern transport microsimulation, as such an approach would require extensive data collection and model calibration that would preclude us covering all mainland state capitals. Despite the simpler nature of our approach, we believe the breadth and spatial resolution of our coverage provides useful insights into how inter 1 The nature of the data we analyse, however, makes some general policy related remarks inevitable.
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