Does Density Foster Shorter Public Transport Networks? A Network Expansion Simulation Approach

Chris Jacobs-Crisioni, Lewis Dijkstra and Andrius Kučas
Additional contact information
Andrius Kučas: Territorial Development Unit, Directorate for a Fair and Sustainable Economy, Joint Research Centre, European Commission, 21027 Ispra, Italy

Land, 2024, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: One argument for containing urban densities is that cities need a critical population density to sustain sufficiently available public transportation. However, the question of whether denser cities foster shorter public transport networks empirically is problematic because real-world transport nets are a product of many additional factors presumably not related to urban form. This paper adopts a network expansion simulation approach to generate and analyze counterfactual data on network lengths for 36 world cities, in which all networks are generated with similar expansion restrictions and objectives. Denser cities are found to have shorter simulated public transport networks, regardless of the tested model parameters. This provides additional proof that densities are needed to facilitate the provision of proximate public transport infrastructure, with potentially self-reinforcing effects.

Keywords: network expansion; land-use density; network simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/13/1/77/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/13/1/77/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:13:y:2024:i:1:p:77-:d:1316194

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().