Impacts of Sprawl of Low Density Urban Areas on Transport Energy Use

Abstract

In the local cities, urban areas are growing into suburbs where more residents have settled because of the economics and population growth. The residents at suburb have different travel behavior from the residents at urban areas, for example, they tend to use private car more frequently, to have longer trips, to use more transport energy and to have higher transport costs.This paper targets Sendai metropolitan areas, and examines the impacts of different densities of urban areas on travel behavior and compares per capita transport energy use and transport cost for different densities, based on the results of Person Trip Survey. Moreover, in order to investigate into the impacts of different implementations of Zoning System on transport energy use and transport cost, per capita transport energy use and transport cost are estimated under the Scenario if urbanization promotion areas had not sprawled since 1970. The results implicate the importance of land use policy on the savings of transport energy and transport cost.