Urban Sprawl and Transportation Externalities

One argument in support of minimizing urban sprawl is that sprawl creates transportation externalities. A problem with empirically examining the relationship between sprawl and transportation externalities is that sprawl is a difficult concept to quantify. This paper uses a measure of sprawl designed by Ewing, Pendall, and Chen (2002) to examine the relationship between sprawl and commute times, automobile ownership, miles driven, fatal auto accidents, air pollution, and highway expenditures. An empirical investigation finds that there is no statistically significant relationship between sprawl and any of these transportation externalities