Transportation, Urban Sprawl, and Sustainability
Environmental Impact of Transportation Networks and Urban Sprawl
- Increased expansion of transportation networks.
- Can lead to pollution.
- Traffic congestion.
- Urban heat islands.
- Traffic, fossil fuels, and air pollution.
- Development related to urban sprawl.
- Can inhibit the use of land for local food production.
- Turning land that could produce food into homes.
- Eliminates conservation land, green belts, open space, or preservation efforts.
Sprawl and Environmental Sustainability
- Explain one way sprawl negatively impacts environmental sustainability.
- Make sure to include all parts of the question.
Transportation-Oriented Development and Urban Sustainability
- Transportation-oriented development.
- Light rail.
- Using trains instead of cars.
- How it promotes sustainability.
- Less air pollution from cars.
- Reduces the number of cars on the road, which then reduces air pollution.
- Decreasing air and noise pollution.
- Promoting walkability, livability, and efficient land use.
- Ecological footprint.
- Heavily trafficked or accessible transit stops may become places of mixed-use development.
- Additional stops can reduce commuting distances or travel times to work.
- Commuting can be more economically sustainable than car travel because of the cost of owning a car, fuel, maintenance, insurance, and parking.
Regional Transportation Networks and Edge Cities
- How regional transportation networks led to the development of edge cities.
- Building a highway encourages people to move.
- Workers move if they have accessibility to the downtown area for their jobs, making it possible for them to live on the outside.
- Transportation enabled commercial land use.
- Edge cities form near major highway intersections or transit stations because those developments need accessibility to workers and/or consumers.
- Transportation provides access to lower-cost land from the city center.
- That's that big rent theory.
Geographic Fragmentation and Metro Line Construction
- Explain how geographic fragmentation of local governments could present a challenge in the DC metropolitan area's ability to construct new metro lines.
- Because there are many different jurisdictions politically, they all have to agree on how to put in the metro line.
- Having competing ideas, authorities and the planning process is inefficient.
- Construction is challenging because you have multiple kinds of government, so they need different people funding different things and zoning different things and cooperating.