Impact of Built Environment Dispersion on Urban Mobility

Abstract

The scattered growth of the city is a common phenomenon occurred with a certain intensity in Europe since the early 80s of last century, due to various causes and producing consequences in different sectors.

In this study we examined the effects of urban sprawl, on commuting mobility within the municipalities, in terms of change in modal split from which, as is known, externalities from the transport system largely depend.

To this end, with reference to a large sample of capital cities, we studied statistical relationships between specially built indicators of urban sprawl and characteristic parameters of mobility, including the modal split.

The results allowed us to consider the existence of possible cause - effect relationships between the variables examined as well as to verify the representativeness of settlement selected variables and to build some statistical models able to reproduce the interactions between urban sprawl and modal split. By these models we estimated the likely lower use of private transport resulting from a less urban sprawl and the consequences on CO₂ emissions and on revenues for public transport.