The Costs of Urban Sprawl: Some New Evidence

Abstract

A large national sample from the US 1977 Nationwide Personal Transportation Study is analyzed in order to test the transport economies that may result from the dispersion of work trip-ends. Based on indirect evidence that the largest metropolitan areas have the largest proportion of noncentral-city work trip-ends, we associate a variety of work-trip results for such cities with a polycentric urban form hypothesis. We claim that these results also suggest that decentralized settlement (‘sprawl’?) is not necessarily uneconomical.