Car Space Recycling Algorithm: A Powerful Urban Planning and Decision-Making Tool

Abstract

The impact of private automobile in the city goes beyond carbon emissions. The land used within the city for service purposes (not only roads but also other types of services such as dealership, parking lots or buildings and auto repair and mechanic services) reshapes the urban morphology by taking away enormous area of underused land, hence evidencing an important and unsustainable environmental and economic system. Taking Quito–Ecuador as a case study, a methodology to identify, quantify, and propose a better use for the urban space allocated for private automobile, aiming at the end for a more sustainable, compact, equitable, and livable city, is proposed. In this occasion, this work continues with an already proposed car space recycling algorithm in a previous article, in two specific points: First, based on an urban index, a cluster of parameters is proposed to identify the areas of intervention best suited to apply this methodology of analysis. Second, a tool is proposed to visualize the hidden potential of underused land for other services (social or environmental) and its economic potential, by comparing the benefits obtained by private automobile oriented services land to the cost in the real estate market if those lands were fully developed to achieve higher density. Finally, this tool by enabling to visualize those results could benefit urban designers, planners, and policy makers when generating strategies for the sustainable development of a city. Strategies like mixed public–private economical inversion within the urban tissue, by taking advantage of sustainable transportation systems, can become successful by fostering moving from an underused land and economically inefficient model to an efficient urban model, all based on informed decisions.