SDKI's 'Transport-Related Energy Sustainability in Canadian Urban Areas' project seeks to quantify sustainable transportation performance indicators [PDF, 1.1 Mb, viewer] that require land use and urban form information. The project is working collaboratively with policy-makers in the Energy Sector of Natural Resources Canada. A synoptic history of the evolution of urban growth in Canada will be produced from the 30-year acquisition record of the Landsat series of satellites. Landsat change maps and information from the National Road Network and population census data will be used for characterizing changes in land use patterns, population densities and levels of transportation activity for the 27 major Canadian cities with populations in excess of 100,000 people. By integrating environmental, socio-economic and transportation infrastructure information, the maps produced by this project will help track progress towards or away from sustainable transportation in each city.

The information generated by this SDKI project will assist government agencies to better understand the impacts of past transportation policies on environmental quality and resource use. In combination with economic and population forecasts, they can also show potential changes and help to shape new policies. This is important since trends from the initial indicators published by the Centre for Sustainable Transportation in 2003 [PDF, 1.2 Mb, viewer] show that Canadian cities are moving away from sustainable transportation.

Indicators such as land use mix, transportation congestion, transportation land use and eco-land fragmentation are measures of the sustainability of urban growth from a transportation perspective, and can be quantified using data from the 'Transport-Related Energy Sustainability in Canadian Urban Areas' project. An example of how the project's data will be used to quantify one of the CST's indicators is the urban land use per capita indicator. Urban land use per capita is calculated by overlaying Statistics Canada's Metropolitan Census Areas boundaries onto remote sensing products that show land use and land cover classes such as built-up area, parkland and areas in transition from rural to urban use. Within each Metropolitan Census Area, an accurate estimate can be produced of the area of urban land use. This information is then compared with the population of each Metropolitan Census Area to calculate urban land use per capita. Because there are strong links between increased land use per capita and increased transportation activity, monitoring this indicator is useful for determining transportation sustainability. Low-density settlement is a stimulus to motor transport activity. An increase in land consumed per person, i.e., square metres per person, indicates that land is being urbanized at a higher rate than population growth - a trend away from sustainability.

Figure 1 Land use map of the Ottawa - Gatineau region, 2000, derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper images and information from the National Road Network (GeoBase) and the National Topographic Data Base (NTDB).

Figure 2. Residential land change distribution (1987-2000), showing the trend of suburbanization in the same region as in Figure 1. When combined with census data from Statistics Canada, change maps can show the spatial distribution of changes in urban land use per capita, an effective indicator for sustainable transportation.