Urban sprawl and home-delivered services: An exploratory analysis of spatial variations of cost and quality in Flanders (Belgium)

Abstract

The phenomenon of urban sprawl is assumed to entail inefficient and cost-ineffective provision of public services. In this study, we investigate the impact of urban sprawl in Flanders on the spatial variation of the quality and cost structure of various services that are provided at home or near homes. Based on a literature review and expert interviews, we collected data with the aim of modelling such cost structures, in particular of local and regional public transport, household waste collection, and postal and parcel services. The findings differ between the various services studied. For public transport, sprawl has hardly any impact on the operational expenses and on the price charged to the traveler, but it does have a direct impact on the quality of the service. In the case of waste collection, differences in operational expenses are consolidated at the level of the collection round or collector, and differences in price or quality are hardly or not at all noticeable by the consumer. Universal postal services are tightly regulated, and consolidate operational expenses at the national level, as a result of which customers do not experience price differences, although they do face differences of distance to access points. These findings indicate that the density of address points along road segments are key to cost effectiveness of home-delivered services. Two new sprawl indicators are proposed for mapping urban sprawl, allowing to model the impact on the provision of various services: the average number of address points per kilometer mapped per road segment, and the inversion, i.e. average road distance between address points mapped per address point of a road segment. The data and models are intended to nourish the debate of whether or how spatially varying costs should be passed on to customers, and allow working towards solutions that serve a more sustainable interaction between urbanization and supply of services.