Regulating traffic with land use planning

This article deals with integrating land use planning and traffic planning to promote sustainable development: how land use planning may be used as one of the means to reduce problems caused by traffic. The growth in car-borne traffic has increased rapidly and consumes more and more land because of land-extensive structure of cities and the traffic demand between human activities (home, work, services). Planning solutions emphasizing the separation of urban functions, in order to avoid health problems, have, together with the availability of inexpensive land on the outskirts of urban areas, contributed to the current generation of environmental problems, primarily from increased dependency on private cars. The OECD and EU have developed principles of sustainable transport and sustainable traffic to tackle the growth of traffic. Urban form and location of activities together with economic incentives and well organized public transport has a significant impact on traffic flows. There is not yet a general political agreement on how the reduction of traffic demand should be legally regulated, but some criteria are suggested to measure sustainable mobility in land use planning. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment