Urban Form and Mobility Choices: Informing about Sustainable Travel Alternatives, Carbon Emissions and Energy Use from Transportation in Swedish Neighbourhoods

Todor Stojanovski

doi:10.3390/su11020548

Abstract

The lack of mobility choices in many Swedish neighbourhoods and cities designed for automobiles hinders the possibilities to shift towards more sustainable travel alternatives. Urban designers and planners can help with redesigning these neighbourhoods and creating urban forms that encourage walking, cycling and increased use of public transportation if they are informed about the environmental performance and carbon implications of transportation systems in existing and newly planned neighbourhoods. This paper proposes a mobility choices model based on urban form and accessibility factors commonly used in urban planning and design practices. The mobility choices model produces heat maps and visually informs about the integration with walking, cycling, public transportation and private car, modal shares, carbon emissions and transportation energy use. This information can (potentially) trigger urban transformation or redesign to better integrate sustainable travel alternatives in these neighbourhoods and contribute to more sustainable cities. Many houses can have an excellent environmental performance as buildings but they can be located at a distance where it is impossible to walk, cycle or use public transportation. The benefits of energy efficient and carbon neutral home then disappears with extensive travel and commuting by automobile.

Highlights

Climate change is a major environmental issue of concern that inspires diverse sustainability initiatives and carbon management practices [1,2,3]
To connect urban planning and design practices with sustainable mobility, travel alternatives, transportation energy use and carbon implications, this paper proposes and tests a mobility choices model based on theories of sustainability indicators [8,23,24,25,26,27,28] and studies on the effect of urban form on travel [15,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54]
The mobility choices model links environmental goals with urban form and accessibility factors commonly used in urban planning and design practices

Summary

Introduction

Climate change is a major environmental issue of concern that inspires diverse sustainability initiatives and carbon management practices [1,2,3]. Many municipalities in Sweden (and in other Nordic countries [12]) tackle the climate change and unsustainable transportation challenge by focusing on curbing carbon emissions and pursuing modal shift towards more walking, cycling and public transportation. Towns and cities, as elsewhere in the developed countries in Europe, North America and Australia, were designed specially to accommodate the private automobile. These urban conurbations of scattered residential suburbs, external shopping malls, office parks interlinked by road hierarchies with the historical downtowns, are dominated by automobile and depend on imports of finite resources of fossil fuels from faraway lands. There is a need to redesign the cities and sprawled neighbourhoods to make walking, cycling and public transportation viable travel alternatives

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Methods

Discussion

Conclusion