01554263

Component

Urban form and the phenomenon of suburban sprawl have, conceptually, multiple dimensions and have accordingly been characterized by a variety of proxy measures, typically available only in cross-section and at aggregate spatial scales. The authors argue for fundamental network properties of the street structure as the underlying and most permanent determinant feature of sprawl, and the authors compute these connectivity metrics at the level of individual road intersections for the entire United States. By merging these data with land parcel records containing original building construction dates, the authors develop a new, high-resolution time series to characterize the contributions to sprawl, street by street, over nearly 100 years. The authors quantify the steady growth in the pattern of sprawl, which appears to have started well before private car ownership was dominant and, most notably, the authors find a previously unreported yet highly significant and widespread turnover in street network properties characterizing new construction across the United States. While recent urban developments continue to add to the stock of low-connectivity neighborhoods characterized as sprawl, new additions since the mid-1990s have become significantly more connected and grid-like than prior to 1990, in accordance with the prescriptions of New Urbanism. In this sense, the peak in sprawl in the US was over two decades ago. The authors analyze spatial variation in these changes and estimate their quantitative impact on vehicle emissions.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD30 Transportation and Land Development.

01550057

15-3927

English

0000-0002-2353-8730

16p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Highway design; Networks; Pollutants; Spatial analysis; Time series; Urban sprawl

United States

Design; Environment; Highways; I15: Environment; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-3927

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:17PM