Abstract
The emergence of Light Rail Transit systems (LRTs) could exert considerable impacts on sustainable urban development. It is crucial to predict the potential land use changes since LRTs are being increasingly built throughout the world. While various land use and land cover change (LUCC) models have been developed during the past two decades, the basic assumption for LUCC prediction is the continuation of present trends in land use development. It is therefore unreasonable to predict potential urban land use changes associated with LRTs simply based on earlier trends because the impacts of LRT investment may vary greatly over time. To tackle this challenge, our study aims to share the experiences from previous lines with newly planned lines. Dongguan, whose government decided to build LRTs around 2008, was selected as the study area. First, we assessed the impacts of this city’s first LRT (Line R2) on three urban land use types (i.e., industrial development, commercial and residential development, and rural development) at different periods. The results indicate that Line R2 exerted a negative impact on industrial development and rural development, but a positive impact on commercial and residential development during the planning stage of this line. Second, such spatial impacts (the consequent land use changes) during this stage were simulated by using artificial neural network cellular automata. More importantly, we further predicted the potential impacts of Line R1, which is assumed to be a newly planned line, based on the above calibrated model and a traditional method respectively. The comparisons between them demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which can easily take advantage of the experiences from other LRTs. The proposed method is expected to provide technical support for sustainable urban and transportation planning.
Highlights
In China, immoderate urban expansion has given rise to a series of social, ecological and environmental issues [1,2]
We found that the “Distance from a cell to the nearest Light Rail Transit systems (LRTs) station” is the most influential spatial variable that drives urban land use changes in the study area
The overall accuracy and figure of merit (FoM) value are 72.55% and 31.62% respectively. All these results have demonstrated that the spatial land use changes influenced by LRT development can be well simulated by the calibrated ANN-CA
Summary
In China, immoderate urban expansion has given rise to a series of social, ecological and environmental issues [1,2]. Numerous studies have indicated that the urban land area in this country exhibited an exponential growth pattern during the past two decades [3,4,5]. According to the National Population Census, the percentage of urban population in China grew from 36.22% to 49.68% between 2000 and 2010 [8] As a consequence, this country has witnessed an increase in private vehicle ownership and usage. Traffic congestion is gradually becoming one of the greatest obstacles to city development [9,10,11]. To alleviate these problems, Chinese governments have given a high priority to the investment in Light Rail Transit (LRT) systems [12,13]. Many LRTs have been put into operation in some large cities (e.g., Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing) over the last fifteen years [13,14,15]
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