During the past two decades, the concept of commuting efficiency has been used to evaluate the relationships between the journey to work and land use at the regional scale. The common approach of calculating regional statistics masks the intraurban variation of commuting efficiency. This paper develops an alternative approach to commuting efficiency and spatial structure assessments based on spatial disaggregation. The extension of existing regional measures by estimating zonal average trip lengths for workers leaving home and employers attracting workers facilitates analysis of intrametropolitan commuting efficiency. Spatially disaggregated metrics are formulated and applied to journey-to-work data for the cities of Warsaw, Poznań , Łódź and Kraków in Poland. At the regional scale, excess commuting varies from 48 per cent (Warsaw) to 67 per cent (Łódź). Intraurban variations in excess commuting indicate that estimates of commuting efficiency are impacted by the jobs-housing balance and are sensitive to locations of zones within the study area.
Access (the ease of reaching valued destinations) is underpinned by land use and transport infrastructure. The importance of access in transport, sustainability, and urban economics is increasingly recognized. In particular, access provides a universal unit of measurement to examine cities for the efficiency of transport and land-use systems. This paper examines the relationship between population-weighted access and metropolitan population in global metropolitan areas (cities) using 30-min cumulative access to jobs for 4 different modes of transport; 117 cities from 16 countries and 6 continents are included. Sprawling development with the intensive road network in American cities produces modest automobile access relative to their sizes, but American cities lag behind globally in transit and walking access; Australian and Canadian cities have lower automobile access, but better transit access than American cities; combining compact development with an intensive network produces the highest access in Chinese and European cities for their sizes. Hence density and mobility co-produce better access. This paper finds access to jobs increases with populations sublinearly, so doubling the metropolitan population results in less than double access to jobs. The relationship between population and access characterizes regions, countries, and cities, and significant similarities exist between cities from the same country.
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