...Commuting, Transportation Spending and Urban Sprawl Roy L. Coxon April 29, 2015 Dr. Hatten My overall topic for my research project is Commuting, Transportation Spending and Urban Sprawl. The purpose of this project is to design a research study to determine and clarify what effect urban sprawl has on private-vehicle commuting costs and household expenditures. Let us first look at the definition of sprawl. There is no universally accepted definition although there have numerous attempts to institute a unified definition of this multifaceted concept. Sprawl is defined as low-density development with residential, shopping and office areas that are isolated, a lack of thriving centers and limited choices in travel routes (Ewing, 2002). Sprawl is ever-present and its effects are impacting the quality of life in every region of America, in our large cities and small towns. The contextual factors (historical) of sprawl go back to 1937 when Earle Draper first created the term “sprawl” in 1937 (Nechyba, 2004). To document the presence of urban sprawl and urban population levels is to look within urban areas at the evolving relationship between suburbs and central cities. The conversion of a primarily rural population in 1790 became increasingly centered in cities over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Only about 5 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas in 1790 as that figure tripled by 1850 and surpassed 50 percent by 1920. The 2000 Census...
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...The term sprawl means to stretch out with a lack of consideration. When I picture a grown man sprawling on a couch, I picture him irreverent: shoes on, one foot on the coffee table and one propped on the couch arm, his hands folded on his chest. Picturing urban sprawl is much the same: an unkempt, uncontrolled and un-officiated way of developing land. Reid Ewing, in his article, “Is Los Angeles Style Sprawl Desirable”, defines sprawl as low density developments which are poorly accessible and lack functional open space. According to John Randolph an advocate for environmentally conscious land use, sprawl is “land-consumptive, dispersed, auto-dependent land development made up of homogeneous segregated uses: housing subdivisions, shopping centers, office/business arks, large civic institutions, and roadways heavily dependent on collector roads (37)” Sprawl is a term which, in the urban planning vernacular, is used to criticize suburban community’s lack of planning which results in auto-centric residents and inefficient and hazardous land usage. Characteristically, sprawl happens when a large population relocates from the city core to the suburbs. The perfect example of how sprawl is happening in America is Atlanta, Georgia. According to Robert D. Bullard’s analysis of Atlanta’s sprawl, between 1990 and 1997, the greater Atlanta area gained 475,600 people of which, only 2,647 (less than 1 percent) were added to the city. Atlanta’s area boundaries doubled in the 1990’s...
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...although recognized as a lagged relationship. In addition, the land use been influenced because of certain problem that need to be overcome especially on traffic congestion. In response, communities are beginning to implement new approaches to transportation planning, such as better coordinating land use and transportation; increasing the availability of high quality transit service; creating redundancy, resiliency and connectivity within their road networks; and ensuring connectivity between pedestrian, bike, transit, and road facilities. In short, they are coupling a multi-modal approach to transportation with supportive development patterns, to create a variety of transportation options. Concerned that traffic congestion and urban sprawl are overwhelming the human scale of city area, an increasing...
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...2006). Consequent to these reforms phenomenon, key cities in India are in the midst of restructuring space, in terms of both use and form. The Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization (LPG) policies of the government of India and opening up of FDI in real estate sector have brought a big boom in the development of large scale private townships variously known as Integrated, NRI or High-Tech townships. These kind of townships are coming up on the peripheral areas of large cities like Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Gurgaon, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Bangalore occupying areas up to 1000 acres and beyond. Rapid urban growth, marked by the number of million-plus cities increasing from 23 in 1991 to 35 in 2001, has led to the problems of urban sprawl, unregulated ribbon development, increasing problems of inadequate urban infrastructure and deteriorating quality of urban livability. The lack of planning that characterizes most suburban growth has resulted in higher transportation costs in terms of money, time and inconvenience for suburban residents, in higher public sector costs, in undesirable land use patterns and in the inadequate supply...
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...the industrial revolution. At first linked closely to design fields such as architecture and landscape architecture, planning moved toward government and administration in the middle of the 20th century and embraced the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. Planning programs in universities developed social science-based doctoral programs and professional programs that required extensive training in policy analysis and social science methods. The dominant philosophy of planning education became, to use Harvey Perloff’s term, a generalist with a specialty. Many of these specialties were policy oriented—transportation, economic development, housing, regional planning, and social and environmental areas of study. In the 1990s, the success of big revitalization projects and new rounds of criticisms of sprawl created renewed interest in what is called physical planning—urban design and land use planning—both among the general public and in city and regional planning. After decades of being a minor specialization in planning, urban design,the design of the urban environment beyond the scale of the building, was increasingly seen as an important area of concentration for US planning practice as well as for architecture and landscape architecture. Land use planning, a traditional bread-and-butter core of the field, broadened its scope beyond traditional comprehensive planning to embrace new approaches to organizing the use of land focused on emerging issues such as protecting ...
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...A fuzzy logic approach to urban land-use mapping Henning Sten Hansen National Environmental Research Institute, Ministry of Environment & Energy Frederiksborgvej 399, DK-4000, Roskilde, Denmark Phone : +45 46 30 18 07 Fax : +45 46 30 12 12 HSH@DMU.DK Abstract. The growth of cities represents huge problems for modern societies. Monitoring, analysing and modelling the urban dynamic call for detailed mapping of urban land-use. Traditionally, urban land-use mapping is based on orthophotos and satellite images, but deriving land-use from remote-sensing alone is not satisfactory. The Danish Building & Dwelling Register is a database containing detailed information like year of construction, use, area etc. Therefore, this database provides a useful foundation for urban land-use mapping. To be able to track urban land-use changes over time, we have chosen square cells (100m x 100m) as basic mapping units. Generally, land cover and land-use mapping are based on crisp classification, but in the current project we have applied a fuzzy modeling approach to land-use mapping. Fuzzy classification offers a better choice in urban land-use mapping, because it can indicate the primary, secondary etc. land-use simultaneously. This will offer more meaningful information for planners and a more detailed understanding of the land-use patterns. Based on these principles, a nation wide urban land-use database for the year 1997 is established. 1 Introduction Metropolitan areas all over the...
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...URAN SPRAWL: DIAGNOSIS AND REMEDIES Throughout this article, the main focus is urban sprawl and the non-endearing remedies to fix this growing concern. Three influential forces are the end results of urban sprawl: a growing population, rising incomes, and falling commuting costs. Although these sound positive to societies well being, market failures are distorting their positive social desirability. The allocation of agricultural land converted to urban usage has justified the criticism of urban sprawl by not accounting for the benefits of open space, social costs of road congestion, and developers failing to pay for the infrastructure costs generated. The remedies projected for these market failures in hope of alleviating the spatial size of the city are developmental taxes and congestion tolls (1). Critics raise a few questions about urban sprawl and the possible remedies policy makers could enact. But, are they are justifiable? The first one is, is urban sprawl truly a growing problem affecting American society? Throughout the article, Brueckner states both views on urban sprawl: The criticism against it and how to prevent it, and the benefits of urban sprawl to American society. Another question addressed is, is urban sprawl contributing to the decay of downtown areas? With the growth of urban development, the incentive to rebuild land and housing closer to the city center is reduced. This is because developers can purchase large amounts of farmland further away from...
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...Portland's largest employer and the area contains the company's biggest chip-making facility, the home of the Pentium III. It seems almost un-American. Why has a hyper-competitive company (whose boss once wrote a book called “Only the Paranoid Survive”) agreed to pay for the privilege of creating jobs? Because it is based in Portland, headquarters of the reaction against “anything-goes” development. And because all over America, for the past year, people have begun to worry about the unfettered expansion of jobs, factories, houses, offices, roads and shops that goes by the name of “sprawl”. Suddenly, sprawl has started to spread itself all over America's public agenda. The Republican governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, calls the preservation of open space her most important task. The Democratic governor of Maryland, Parris Glendening, says that, education apart, “controlling sprawl is the most important issue facing us in terms of what our quality of life is going to be.” In this section Straining at the seams Alien scientists take over USA! Not quite the monster they call it Help from the Hidden Hand Mud-slinging, body-slamming Uh-huh Pass the salt Reprints Related topics Taxes Public finance Intel United States Portland, Oregon Almost everybody with a voice that needs to get heard seems to agree. Early this year, Vice-President Al Gore announced...
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...Discuss the impact of the automobile’s rise on urban form during the twentieth century and critically evaluate planning measures used to limit the negative social and environmental aspects Since the rise of the automobile, there have been many dramatic changes to urban form in attempts to accommodate this new mode of transport. Focusing on America and Britain, this discussion considers influences on all scales ranging from reclassification of physical roads to the decentralization of urban cores. The rising social and environmental concerns caused by the increase in vehicle usage include pedestrian safety, residential livability, and environmental deterioration. I have decided to explore this question by considering features that have both affected urban form and also acted as planning measures to limit negative social and environmental impacts, these include motorway developments, the garden city urban planning approach and Greenbelts. With over 15 million units of Ford Motor T sold between 1908 and 1927 (Flink, 2001), urban form was most dramatically influenced in American cities during the correlating time period. Planners began to oppose the conventional Roman-grid layouts, where streets were arranged at perpendicular angles to each other. Rising traffic congestion at intersections placed pressure on city planners to reorganise the structural layout in attempts to liberate these chaotic streets. Pedestrians were heavily victimised...
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...Suburbanisation is the process of outward growth of an urban conurbation as people move out of the inner city towards the suburbs. This often results in the engulfing of towns and cities to create one large urban area. This is also known as urban sprawl. This process of suburbanization and urban sprawl often occurs due to urban push factors pulling people away from the CBD and inner city towards the suburbs. These push factors include cheaper land meaning both business and families can have bigger homes and premises. Abundance of cheaper land also means that homes are not as crowded as when compared to those within the inner city and CBD. Suburbs also have better schools, a safer feel and have larger open spaces. This means that many suburbs can be ideal for families. In addition suburbs often are very well connected to the rest of the city resulting in suburbs being ideal for commuting. All of the aforementioned factors can be witnessed within the megacity of LA with suburbs such as woodland hills having large houses situated on green leafy streets. In addition woodland hills also has the warner center which is a large shopping center situated within the suburb. This large shopping center means that for many of the residents there is often no need for them to travel into the center of the city. This has an effect on the city whereby a donut city begins to occur. Donut cities are where the center of a city such as Los Angeles began to decline leading to dereliction and concentrations...
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...Frontier or Sustainable Ethics in Your Region In my opinion, the Frontier Ethics is what is practiced most by humans. I think in some cases humans don't know the facts or have all the information that is needed pertaining to this topic, therefore Frontier Ethics is more dominant for most. However, I feel that if humans were educated in this subject that Sustainable ethics would be practiced more often. With that being said, thinking back on where I grew up I seem to remember that it seemed to be a combination of both Frontier Ethics & Sustainable Ethics depending on the situation at that given time. However, I would lean more towards sustainable ethics being the most prevalent. I had several Aunts and Uncles that had their own timber company and most of the timber was used in everyday living for them especially during the winter months. They re-used and recycled about everything that they could. There was no looking at it from a frontier ethics standpoint when it came to timber supply because it wasn't an option to move elsewhere. Thus is why they made any resource last as long as it could and they did a lot of planting as well. Energy was preserved a lot because they used oil lanterns as much as they could. Whereas, two of the frontier ethics mindset is that the earth is an unlimited bank of resources and if the supply runs out there's always more elsewhere. The mindset where I grew up was geared more towards sustainable ethics mainly because they had to make due...
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...Theorising the peri-urban As a result of the rapid growth of cities across Nigeria, peri-urban settlements, referred to as transition zones, where urban and rural activities exist side by side have experienced rapid alterations induced by human activities (Thando & Gwebu, 2013). Furthermore, to understand this dynamics of change in peri-urban settlements, different scholars have undertaken a myriad of studies with a view to explaining the patterns, determinants, impacts and policy implications of the spatial expansion of cities in the developing world. Most of these present-day discussions of peri-urban settlements emphasize patterns of change, mainly resulting from infringement from a neighbouring city as explained in their expressions....
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...almost the size of Massachusetts. Currently our farmland loss is at an astonishing 1 acre + a minute. Now you might not think that this affects you, but you are wrong. B. I want you to think about things that you do every day. Well I know that one thing almost everyone does every day is eat. Eating is necessary to live, and about 99% of your food is probably coming from a farmer. According to Nelson at the American Farmland Trust farmland is necessary in society providing essential goods as well as open space, environmental protection that land markets fail to account for. C. We have been using farmland for things other than farming and it needs to stop, urban development is taking over the land which is so vital to our existence. D. Farmland is being lost way too fast. Urban development is one of the biggest reasons for this loss. We need to stop using our farmland for other things. II. Body A. The amount of land that is usable for farming is very small compared to the amount of land on the earth. Coming from the researchers at farmland.org and the American Farmland Trust is this analogy. (ppt) Consider the Earth as an apple. If it was sliced into 4 pieces, 3 of these would represent water. 1 would be the land. If you were to cut this piece in half, your new piece would represent the land that cannot be used for farming living on. This leaves 1/8 of the Earth to live on as well as grow food on. ¾ of the remaining apple has soil...
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...reduction of valuable farmland near cities and increased urban pollution. Urban sprawl affects the environment by destroying native habitats and increasing urban pollution including air pollution from increased traffic and urban waste into waterways. There are many definitions of urban sprawl. The Heinemann Atlas states that urban sprawl means the spread of urban areas into rural areas such as farmland, forests and coastal lands that lie on the outer edges of cities. In other words, urban sprawl is described by development that increases the distance between the city center and its outer edge. (2003, HYPERLINK "http://www.hi.com.au/atlas/updates/bg.asp?subtopicid=3619" http://www.hi.com.au/atlas/updates/bg.asp?subtopicid=3619) It is estimated that 88% of the world’s population growth next century will be in urban areas. This phenomenon especially in Australia where more than 80% of the people live in cities and coastal areas. Australia’s cities however will continue to grow and the numbers of people both live and work will increase. A number of Australian cities have the problems that associated with urban sprawl. Indeed, some of Australia’s cities are considered the world’s worst in terms of their sprawling nature. For example, Perth’s metropolitan area currently spreads more than 100 kilometers in a North-South direction. The city of Wanneroo, in the Northern suburbs of Perth, is the second fastest growing urban area in Australia. (2003, HYPERLINK "http://www.hi...
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...Urban Growth and Decline CHANGE OVER TIME The spatial nature of Sydney has changed over time. In the 1830s, Sydney was a `walking' city with densely populated urban areas such as Redfern, Woolloomooloo and Paddington close to the central business district (CBD). After 1880, Sydney evolved into a transit city due to the building of railways, which encouraged the growth of suburbs such as Parramatta. In 1932, the Harbour Bridge was opened, providing a transport link and faster access to North Shore suburbs such as Pymble. The evolution to an automobile city began after World War II and saw the growth of suburbs north (Cherrybrook), south (Menai) and west (St Marys). Faster road and rail links and the availability of cheaper housing eventually led to the development of dormitory towns for commuters in the Wollongong, Central Coast and Blue Mountains areas. URBAN SPRAWL In the 1970s and 1980s, Australian cities tended to continually grow outwards in a process known as urban sprawl. Increasing car ownership and the development of freeways gave people greater choice in where they could live and work. The development of new housing on the rural±urban fringe also encouraged the development of shops, schools, medical centres, industries and recreational facilities to support the growing population. The impact of urbanisation in these outer areas has been a loss of natural environments and changes to rural land use on the edge...
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