Urban form and travel behavior: experience from a Nordic context

Næss, Petter

doi:10.5198/jtlu.v5i2.314

Cited by 181 publications

(126 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…The basic mechanisms through which urban structure influences travel are theoretically well understood and have been identified in numerous empirical studies (see Naess, 2012a for an overview of such studies within a Nordic context). Compact cities tend to be less car-dependent, provide for shorter trips and have lower per capita consumption of energy for transportation than do sprawling, low-density cities (see, e.g.…”

Section: Sustainability and Urban Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable urban development and the multi-level transition perspective

Næss

Vogel

2012

Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions

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This article discusses some challenges and possible adaptations of transition theory as a framework for analyzing the prospects for environmentally more sustainable development of urban land use and transport infrastructure. Rather than depending first and foremost on niche innovations, a transition toward sustainable urban development is a matter of changing the composition of existing multisegmented land use and transportation regimes. Those well-experienced forms of built environment and transport infrastructure that are in line with sustainability objectives should be strengthened while those that are not should be actively constrained and reduced. Urban development in a Danish provincial city is used as a case to illustrate some of the points made in the theoretical part of the article. Due to the wide gap between present conditions and those required to realize a sustainable urban development, more attention should be directed toward landscape level conditions and possibilities for changing them.

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Section: Sustainability and Urban Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable urban development and the multi-level transition perspective

Næss

Vogel

2012

Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions

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“…Other researchers have also recently sought to offer a reduced set of metrics to quantify neighborhood form, including street density and connectivity (Song, Popkin, and Gordon-Larsen 2013). Distance to secondary centers has not been used frequently in US research but has been employed in relevant studies in Europe (Naess 2011(Naess , 2012.…”

Section: Built Environment Socioeconomic and Travel Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stay local or go regional? Urban form effects on vehicle use at different spatial scales: A theoretical concept and its application to the San Francisco Bay Area

Milakis

Cervero

Wee

2015

JTLU

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This paper explores the respective roles of local and regional characteristics of urban form on vehicle travel. We hypothesize that the effects of urban form on vehicle use at the local and regional levels are complementary, and we introduce the concept of local and regional action spaces, which are defined based on the accessibility of alternative means of transport within an acceptable travel time, to test this hypothesis. Multilevel and ordered logit models are developed for the San Francisco Bay Area to estimate the effects of urban form and socioeconomic characteristics on vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) and vehicle trip frequency (for work, shopping, and social/recreational purposes). We find that the two urban scale characteristics exert complementary effects on VKT. However, because people in the San Francisco Bay Area display significantly lower VKT in the local than in the regional action space, we conclude that regional-scale interventions would contribute more to the policy objective of VKT reduction, although local-scale design policies might also help reach this policy goal. Intersection density (for the local action space models) and regional jobs accessibility (for the regional action space models) demonstrated the strongest and most significant relationships with VKT. The built environment did not appear to significantly affect vehicle trip frequency, which is likely due to the uniformly high levels of vehicle use in both the local and regional action spaces in the area.

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“…A particular emphasis in the sustainable city agenda has been put on energy consumption in transportation and everyday travel behaviours. For many authors there is a direct relation between transport and urban form [20][21][22]. Unlike the previous works, now the question is not how to improve the maladies originating from the modern urban planning approach, but how to generate the urban qualities demanded by the new trend of compact cities, which has become the paradigm of the sustainable city.…”

Section: Urban Qualities and Sustainable Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban quality and the sustainable city in Norway: the challenge of density

Hernández-Palacio¹

2015

WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment

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Increasing urban density has been regarded as one of the key strategies to achieve sustainable urban ways of living. The compact city has become the paradigm of the sustainable urban form particularly because of its contribution to environmentally friendly mobility and the decrease of the carbon footprint. Density has also been a precondition to many of the qualities of the 'good city' in the tradition of architecture, urban design, and planning, long before the emergence of the concept of the sustainable city. This former ideal can be closely related to the principles behind the sustainable city, and can be a highly relevant contribution to the materialisation of sustainable built environments. The question addressed in this paper is how density can contribute to the ideal of the 'good city', since this quality is a key component of the Norwegian sustainable city policy. This paper analyses density as a key component of the concept of urban quality through a comprehensive literature review. The findings indicate that urban density was a key component of the ideal of the 'good city' long before the emergence of urban sustainability. Density has been incorporated later as an essential characteristic of the Norwegian sustainable city policy. Increasing density, however, may have two kinds of risk: the first is the decline of urban quality and its consequences in people's quality of life, and the second is the increase of gentrification and the exacerbation of social inequalities.

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Urban form and travel behavior: experience from a Nordic context

Cited by 181 publications

References 64 publications

Sustainable urban development and the multi-level transition perspective

Sustainable urban development and the multi-level transition perspective

Stay local or go regional? Urban form effects on vehicle use at different spatial scales: A theoretical concept and its application to the San Francisco Bay Area

Urban quality and the sustainable city in Norway: the challenge of density

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