Exploring Land Use-Transportation Nexus: A Comprehensive Analysis of Complexity Between Spatial Dynamics and Urban Travel Behavior in Developing Cities

Urban travel behavior in developing cities forms a complex system with nonlinear interactions among socioeconomic factors, land use patterns, and transportation infrastructure. This study examines these intricate dynamics in Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC), Bangladesh, using a multimodel approach to capture emergent properties of urban mobility. Analyzing data from 2286 households across six zones, we developed three interconnected models: Trip Production Model (TPM), Trip Attraction Model (TAM), and Household Kilometers Traveled Model (HKTM). The TPM showed that increasing household size by one unit boosts trip production by 1.537 times, while a one-unit increase in accessibility raises it by 1.930 times. Interestingly, the TAM revealed that higher accessibility can decrease trip attractions (coefficient: −1.412), indicating emergent congestion effects. The HKTM indicated that a one-unit improvement in road connectivity leads to an increase of 2.652 km in household travel. Our results demonstrate that socioeconomic and land use factors explain 75.1% of the variability in trip production, emphasizing the system’s complexity. The City Center, with the highest entropy index (0.80), attracted the most trips, whereas the Northern Fringe, despite a low entropy (0.52), generated the highest number of trips. These surprising findings highlight the nonlinear relationships in urban mobility and stress the importance of context-specific solutions to address urban transportation challenges. By applying complex systems theory, including concepts of self-organization and feedback loops, we provide a comprehensive framework for understanding and modeling urban transport dynamics in developing areas, offering valuable insights for adaptive policy-making amid rapid urban growth.