01473493

Component

Urban India is rapidly growing as people dream of better lives and move to cities. However, areas within city boundaries are growth constrained due to floor-area ratio ceilings. Thus, much of the new growth ‘escapes’ to urban peripheries where small existing towns and villages become agglomeration anchors. Many peripheral areas become bedroom communities for lower-income households, but have inadequate infrastructure supply. This paper focuses on how suburbanization is affecting vehicle use in the Greater Mumbai Region (GMR). As incomes grow, regulatory burdens and use costs become smaller, increasing households’ willingness to use vehicles, especially for non-discretionary trips. The lack of efficient travel options adds to private vehicle use. Higher vehicle use impacts quality of life issues such as time spend commuting, accident rates, noise pollution, and particulate/GhG emissions. Using a 1.5% household travel dataset of the GMR, this paper presents findings from vehicle kilometers traveled and person kilometers traveled models. The unit of analysis is the household, and models are specified as log-log ordinary least square regressions. The models show that vehicle use goes down if density of housing and jobs increases at the home or work location. Car use goes up with per capita income, but it goes down for two-wheelers. Vehicle use increases with distance to transit and number of earners in the household. Overall, the findings have implications not just for managing vehicle use through mechanisms such as pricing during peak times, but also for management of the agglomerative forces both within and outside municipal boundaries.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE90 Transportation in the Developing Countries.

01470560

13-3255

English

16p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Automobile travel; Impacts; Least squares method; Quality of life; Suburbs; Two wheeled vehicles; Urban sprawl

Mumbai (India)

Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Society; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-3255

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:39PM