Date of Award

2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

First Advisor

Jenkins, Jacqueline Marie

Subject Headings

Transportation -- Environmental aspects, Land use -- Environmental aspects, Transportation -- Planning, Cities and towns -- Growth, Civil engineering -- Environmental aspects, civil engineering transportation planning transportation

Abstract

Across the United States, the need and value of coordinated land use and transportation planning have become a highly debated topic. There are those who believe that the coordination of land use and transportation is best served in the development of compact communities with alternate modes of travel. This approach is thought to preserve natural resources and result in a reduction in the number and length of vehicle trips. Others believe that such compact developments will lead to highly congested transportation systems. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has acknowledged the need and value of coordinating land use and transportation planning, and has taken several initiatives to integrate these processes. In addition, there have been a variety of previous research efforts which investigated specific relationships between various individual land use measures and transportation outcomes. Such efforts have also included the development of various entropy values and metrics which serve to combine various land use measures. Generally speaking, compact developments, with high population and employment density, good street connectivity, and access to transit have been shown to be associated with lower vehicle miles traveled (VMT). The objective of this thesis was to examine whether the latest published metric for evaluating the sprawl of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) is correlated with transportation outcomes, as predicted by the relationships reported in the literature. To do so, a comprehensive literature review was conducted. The quantitative relationships between land use measures and transportation outcomes were extracted from the literature and cataloged. Those land use measures and transportation outcomes that were consistently found to be correlated were identified. The transportation data was extracted from the latest release of the Urban Mobility Report. Using linear regression analysis, the relationship between the latest sprawl index values and the transportation data was examined

Download
COinS