A model to evaluate energy efficient spatial structure for transportation via spatially balancing the job - house ratio - The case of Sri Lanka

The trend of haphazard land use practices has caused for a massive cost and a congestion in major transport corridors. In this case, a proper combination of land use distribution will be able to optimize the Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) to reduce the transportation-related energy consumption and city congestion. One of the significant approaches of integrating transport and urban development is developing an optimized ratio for administrative level job-house combinations. The objective of this re-search is to develop a method to identify a job-house ratio for each analysis zones where the road congestion will be optimized. The gravity model is used to perform the trip distribution and it is assigned to the road network using the graph theory. The main assumption taken in the study is that the trip generation by a group of population in a particular area is considered as work based trips. The result of the method for Colombo district indicated that the job-house ratio varies from 0.1 to 9.2 resulting an average trip length of 23 km between houses to work locations. However, the method suggested a minimum and maximum value of 0.5 and 4 which reduced the VMT from 46% and average fuel consumption by 22%.