The impact of urban morphology on urban transportation mode: A case study of Tokyo

Abstract

With the rapid trend of motorization in metropolis, building a harmonious urban transportation system to ease traffic pressure is a common issue faced by many countries in urban development process. Since urban form has a significant impact on urban transportation, how to build a mutually reinforcing relationship between urban form and urban traffic modes has attracted many interests.As the outcome of urban development, urban agglomeration changes the demographic structure of employment and industry, which prompts the urban morphology changes. Thus, the travel demand becomes increasingly diversified and complicated which bring forth new challenges to urban transportation supply. Similarly, the urban transport will also influence the travel cost, accessibility, therefore affect urban function, land use intensity, population density, and other characteristics of land use in urban morphology. This study will summarize the experiences of urban development and explore the impact of urban form on the urban traffic mode.Great Tokyo Area, as the largest mega-region and urban agglomeration economy in the world so far (Parilla and Trujillo, 2014), has experienced a rapid growth in the twentieth century. As a typical eastern Asia region, Tokyo area has been facing challenges of high population density and traffic pressure, thus undergo massive urban transformation and rapid traffic mode development. The study provides a historical review perspective on great Tokyo area using a large set of data on economic factors, population, land use policies and urban traffic modes. How the urban form transformation interacted with development of traffic mode is investigated and divided to different evolving phases. The associations between urban form and traffic mode are studied in each phase accordingly.