Determining the Regional Job-House Balance Ratio Based on Congestion Factor and Centrality

— It is accepted in urban and regional planning that a proper distribution of land use zoning will be able to optimize the Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) to reduce the transportation-related energy consumption and congestion. One of the strategic approaches of integrating transport and urban planning is introducing an optimized ratio for administrative level job-house combinations. The objective of this research is to develop a computer-aided mechanism to assist the determination of development zoning regulations based on the job-house combination in a regional context. The R programming platform is used to develop the automated tool. The data required for the analysis are road network details, trip generation and trip attraction details at each Traffic Analysis Zone (TAZ). The gravity model is used to carry out the trip distribution and it is assigned to the road network using the graph theory. The centrality values are used to estimate the potential trip attraction levels. The main assumption undertaken in the study is that the trip generation occurred by a group of population in a particular TAZ is considered as work based trips. The result of the method for Colombo district, Sri Lanka indicated that the job-house ratio varies from 0.1 to 9.2 resulting in an average trip length of 23 km from houses to work locations. Finally, 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% .