Abstract

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Literature review

۳٫ Data and methods

۴٫ Results and discussion

۵٫ Conclusion

CRediT authorship contribution statement

References

Abstract

     The concept of sustainable retail development implies that retail centres should serve their communities economically and socially, while not degrading local environments. However, existing literature identifies that retail centres often create negative externalities, impacting the sustainable development of both the core and peripheries of city regions. International evidence also shows that retail sprawl and transport emissions have been exacerbated by existing planning architecture, notably retail parks. This has resulted in commercial centres shifting from high streets to car-dependent, suburban retail centres, worsening congestion levels and environmental degradation.

     This paper examines how location-effects influence transport-related emissions and travel mode choice when shopping in Ireland’s five major administrative city regions. This paper adapts 2016 Census commuting data, and utilises retail and residential location data, to estimate hypothetical travel-related emissions within a multi modal transportation network incorporating cars, buses, cycling, and walking. This analysis is performed at the Small Area level for Ireland’s five major cities and their surrounding commuter belts.

Introduction

     Urban sprawl is a by-product of haphazard, rapidly expanding urban development (Nechyba and Walsh, 2004). Due to the heterogenous nature of urban areas, and the complicated relationships between development indicators and their environment, refining this definition further can be problematic (Ewing, 1997). However, sprawled developments are commonly characterised by low population density, low accessibility, and segregated land (OECD, 2018). Urban sprawl can also refer to areas which experience spatial expansion rates greater than that of population growth, which generally decreases population density over time, and increases emission outputs due to longer travel distances (Song and Sohn, 2007). With evidence suggesting that sprawl in all forms contributes to environmental degradation (European Environmental Agency (EEA), 2006), we focus on a particular dimension of urban sprawl, namely retail sprawl, and its relationship with travel-related emission outputs.

     Retail sprawl refers to the urban exodus of firms in favour of cheaper and more abundant land on urban peripheries (Wassmer, 2002). It specifically relates to the consequences of businesses moving to suburbs (Frenkel and Ashkenazi, 2008; Vandenbulcke et al., 2009) and was initially characterised by strip-mall development, whereby commercial developments were usually situated parallel to roads, but it has since outgrown this characterisation due to the scale of modern retail parks (Department of Housing Planning Community and Local Government, 2012).

Conclusion

     Here, we highlight the environmental issues associated with peripheral retail developments, an issue typically under addressed by policymakers, often treated as an afterthought to wider sprawl problems (European Environmental Agency (EEA), 2006; Department of Housing Planning Community and Local Government, 2012; OECD, 2018). Our objectives revolve around modelling retail development in terms of emission outputs by investigating which retail centre locations tend to produce the most hypothetical travel-related emissions. Thereafter, specific comparison between central and peripheral locations is made, testing the environmental merits of central place and gravity theories. Finally, we investigate the relationship between hypothetical travel-emissions, retail locations, and transport mode.

     Our principal finding is that travel-related emission problems occur when retail centres are in fringe areas. These retail environments generally witness diminishing numbers of sustainable transport users as distances from city cores increase, a problem attributed to car dependency and inadequate infrastructure, as proxied by current commuting behaviour. Furthermore, these results suggest retail centres that are most accessible by car, tend to become inaccessible when using sustainable transport modes, exposing a transport hierarchy in these fringe areas dominated by cars, reinforcing this dependency. In city cores, we find that emission problems are not as prevalent, because the proportion of trips is shared more evenly across alternative transport modes.