Measuring sprawl and its transportation impacts

Across the United States, urban sprawl, its impacts, and appropriate containment policies have become the most hotly debated issues in urban planning. Today’s debates have no anchoring definition of sprawl, which has contributed to their unfocused, dogmatic quality. Efforts to measure sprawl and test for relationships between sprawl and transportation out-comes are described. This is the first use of the newly minted Rutgers– Cornell sprawl indicators. Sprawl is operationalized by combining many variables into a few factors representing density, land use mix, degree of centering, and street accessibility. This consolidation of vari-ables is accomplished with principal component analysis. These factors are then related to vehicle ownership, commute mode choice, commute time, vehicle miles traveled per capita, traffic delay per capita, traffic fatalities per capita, and 8-h ozone level. These associations are made with multiple regression analysis. For most travel and transportation outcomes, sprawling regions perform less well than compact ones. Th