Investigating the Relationship Between Urban form and Energy Consumption in Urban Settlements (Case Study: Qazvin City)

Abstract

Due to global warming, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and people's dependence on private cars, the need for more attention from urban experts to the impact of urban form indicators and economic and social indicators on energy consumption and traffic behaviors of citizens, becomes more critical than before Among these, the city form with indicators such as density, mixed land-use, design, distance to public transportation, and distance to the city center is one of the most important determining factors in the travel patterns of residents. The present study is applied research with 1000 sample volumes to investigate the relationship between city form indicators and socio-economic indicators as well as household travel behavior on the distance between household travel and VKT in the traffic areas of Qazvin city. In this study, statistical methods of Pearson correlation and multivariate regression have been used. The analysis results indicate that the variables of city form and socio-economic variables, and household travel behavior affect the distance traveled by private car up to 23%, the distance traveled by the family up to 33%, and the working distance of households up to 17%. In this study, the distance to the city center (with a beta coefficient of 0.217) is the most essential variable of city form affecting the amount of VKT, and the factor of vehicle ownership (with a beta coefficient of 0.243) is the most influential economic variables on the amount of VKT.

Keywords

• sustainable development
• city form
• travel distance
• vehicle kilometer travel
• qazvin city