Study on the Impacts of Urban Density on the Travel Demand Using GIS Spatial Analysis

Urban density is one of the most important factors for the assessment of travel demand. It not only reflects the intensity of travel demand but also provides an effective method to quantify the influencing factors of travel demand. In this paper, two cities, Dalian and Shenyang, have been selected for case study. GIS spatial analysis technique has been introduced to analyze the average characteristics of general density, urban densities and their spatial difference. According to the characteristics of travel demand, urban densities have been divided into single density and composite density. Then spatial analysis method and spatial statistics method have been used to study the influence of urban densities on the occurrence, distance, time, and mode of travel. It has been concluded that different urban densities have certain effect on different travel demand, and within certain threshold, there is an obvious monotonous relationship between urban density and travel demand. © 2007 China Association for Science and Technology.