Integrated policy analysis of sustainable urban and transportation development

Sustainable urban and transportation development needs to balance economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social equity. This study conducts integrated policy analyses by explicitly incorporating these sustainability goals and optimizing the performance of transportation networks. This is done based on a bi-level programming approach, in which the upper level addresses sustainability goals and the lower level describes the optimization of a transportation network. On the upper level, car ownership, number of trips according to travel mode and accessibility-based social equity are optimized under the constraint of environmental capacity, which is calculated based on stochastic frontier analysis. On the lower level, a four-step travel demand modeling framework is adopted. In case studies, the maximal mobility level under the environmental capacity constraint is calculated, and various package policies for sustainable development are simulated.