The impacts of rail transit on future urban land use development: A case study in Wuhan, China

In urban development, the integration of an Urban Rail Transit System (URT) and land use is vital for transit-oriented, low carbon, and sustainable cities. Understanding how URTs shape urban land use patterns is important to make proactive planning and achieve the integrated development. This study proposes a consolidated multinomial logit (MNL) and land use allocation model to quantify the impacts of URTs on urban land use change, and forecasts future land maps taking such influence into consideration. The newly built transit rail lines in Wuhan metropolitan area, China are selected as the case study. The parcel-based land use data for years 2000 and 2010 are utilized to analyze the actual change of land floor/building area in three rail transit served areas: existing-served, proposed-served, and non-served. The MNL models are employed to verify how and to what extent URTs affect the change of land use, including both land cover and density. At a grid cell level (50 m × 50 m), the MNL models are calibrated. To maximize the land suitability from the calibrated MNL models, a network-flow based land allocation model is used to generate future land use maps. Model validation shows high predictive ability (92.1%) for simulating land use change from year 2000–2010. The results indicate that the model is effective in quantifying the impacts of URTs and is able to reflect them in simulating land use change. The future land use maps in 2020 are produced to provide an important reference for urban planners to intuitively visualize the future land development under the impacts of the proposed URTs. Most importantly, the generalized model framework could be applied to other cities to evaluate the impacts of URTs on land development and visualize future land maps to make proactive spatial planning interventions for sustainable urban development.