Given that the spatial organization of the city is fixed (or worse, increasingly sprawled) what can we do to reduce the VMT needed for commuting? Are there signs that US style patterns will dominate in large cities?
Article RETRACTED ARTICLE: Study on the spatial mismatch of big urban in China
Thanks for the comment. In the short term, the locations and the transit infrastructure are fixed, so the issue is to modify the spatial interactions. I agree that in the medium term land use concentration can help, and in the longer term a fully integrated transit system is needed to move people. The rapid development in big Chinese cities is astonishing. It will be interesting to see what happens to trip length and vehicle miles (VMT) as these systems are built out..
Perhaps another way of putting it -- the concept of short/medium/long term has to be adjusted to accommodate rapid transformation of the built environment. This might be usefully placed in the context of what Yorgo Papageorgiou has referred to as sudden urban growth. What is happening to trip lengths as this growth occurs whether (slowly) or (rapidly)?
The spatial organization is NOT fixed. Taking adaptive re-use (gas station recycled to become a flower shop) a step further, virtual presence can be used to move functionality around to strategic locations. A bank ATM in a grocery store is an obvious example. My Blue Line TeleVillage project in 1995 (based in Compton CA adjacent ot a rail stop demonstrated the feasibility of "programmable" buildings. Functionality could change day by day, or even hour by hour thereby locating multiple destinations in a single compact building or cluster of buildings. Beyond that, VMT is kind of an obsolete metric. VMT in an electric drive vehicle uses zero gasoline and emits zero GHG emissions -- as I have demonstrated for the South Bay Cities Council of Governments (in Los Angeles). See the NEV Demonstration report at www.southbaycities.org -- 20% across the board reduction per household in gallons of gas, GHG, and criteria pollutants. Walter Siembab
We are discussing how to change the relative prices between car trip X mass transit trip. Despite the improve of mass transit we recomend to Brazilian big cities to develop parkimg policy and other tools too disistimulate the car use
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Internet connectivity is the boon. Now most of the office based on laptop phone and Internet so Internet shopping home working and use of mass transit can be helpful rather than auto which again act like private vehicles and cost wise uneconomical. The best is changing the land use pattern and reduce vat by having walking zone area and development concept of work and amenities centre.
I suggest to use cautiously the concept of excess commuting because of three arguments. There is some excess from one particular point of view, that of the spatial planner, or the urban researcher; there is probably no excess from the point of view of the traveller. In addition excess travel in the literature sometimes refer to trips longer than they could be (King et Mast 1987) and trips done by pure pleasure of the trip itself (Mokhtarian et Salomon 2001). I have no suggestion for an alternative concept but wanted just to warn that this can have several interpretations not directly related to the topic of auto and urban form.
King, Gerhart F., et Truman M. Mast. 1987. « Excess travel: causes, extent, and consequences ». Transportation Research Record, no 1111. http://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=277880.
Article How Derived is the Demand for Travel? Some Conceptual and Me...
Avoid transport needs is a crucial step on this. There is mainly four aspect related to demands on transport -work, studying, pleasuring and indeed moving for health reasons. Must of this demands could be diminished by urban planning alternatives as well as ICT development that allows to reduce demands for transportation or at least change the time and stress on specific periods.
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