The impact of the opening of Gated communities on transportation and traffic carbon emission

Abstract

The gated communities are representative of the "inward-oriented" management mode of the city, which is often accompanied by the isolation of large spaces. This isolation obstructs the regional road traffic, reduces the efficiency of city roads, and impacts the surrounding environment. In order to explore the relationship between small gated community units and the urban environment. We take Beijing, a representative metropolis in China, as an example to simulate the changes in traffic flow and carbon emission before and after the opening of the gated community, based on the traffic congestion data and the Frank-Wolfe method. At the same time, we further consider the factors of people's choice and compare the travel modes of gated communities and similar open communities based on the big data of community population portrait and EMD-LSTM, to simulate the final change of transportation carbon emissions of closed communities after long-term opening. The results show that the opening of gated communities can effectively alleviate congestion and reduce the overall carbon emissions of the community when only traffic allocation is considered. However, while the community remains open, people will shift more commuting modes from walking, cycling, etc., to car travel in the long run because of more traffic expectations for the area, and increasing carbon emissions.