Smart growth and travel behavior—A synthesis with a focus on the United States

Abstract

The contemporary society faces many challenges such as climate change, loss of natural recourses, pollutions, traffic congestion, obesity, and inequality. They are associated with sprawling land use developments that have been the dominant pattern in the United States and across the globe for several decades. On the contrary, smart growth promotes compact development, infill development or redevelopment in existing neighborhoods, mixed-use development, high accessibility supported by multimodal transportation options, and open spaces and the natural environment. Smart growth has significant impacts on people's travel behavior. Empirical studies from the United States and other countries showed that adopting the smart growth principles on land use patterns and transportation could reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and auto dependency through shorter travel distance and mode shifts. With compact and mixed-use developments, destinations are closer to origins and each other, thus travel distances are shorter. With developments toward well-connected streets with multimodal transportation services, walking, cycling, and taking transit become viable options. The mode choice starts to shift from dominantly driving to these alternative modes. Despite the transportation and other benefits that it has, smart growth faces many challenges in practice, such as consumer preferences, mixed information, lack of tools. With the intensification of climate change and other crises we are facing today, it becomes urgent to overcome these challenges to implement smart growth principles more widely across the globe.