Sustainable land use and transport planning for high-density city

Abstract

Air pollution has become a pressing issue, and the transport sector is an important source of emissions. Because of the strong interactions between land use and transport, it is useful to develop an integrated model for the land use, transport, and the environment. The prediction of housing location choices is important for making decisions on how to allocate resources for land use developments, and the spatial analysis of air pollution and housing location choice in urban cities becomes an interesting but challenging problem. In this study, we adopt an alternative continuum modelling approach, in which we consider a city with several central business districts (CBDs) serving several classes of road users. The road network is relatively dense and can be approximated as a continuum. Transport demand and housing provision are continuously distributed outwards from the CBDs, and the commercial activities are concentrated in the CBDs. People travel between their homes and the CBDs along the least costly route during rush hours. We establish a bi-level model to determine the transport demand, traffic intensity, and CO2emissions with an optimized housing development pattern that minimizes total greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, we also attempt to develop a model that takes explicit account of the dispersion pattern of pollutants in the city, and the effect of air quality on housing location choice.