Investigating the relationship between urban form and energy consumption in urban Sites (Case study: Qazvin city)

Considering global warming and increasing greenhouse gas emissions and dependence of people on private cars, the need for urban experts and urban planners to pay more attention on these subjects, especially on the impacts of urban form indicators and socio-economic indicators on energy consumption and traffic behaviors of citizens, becomes more important than before. Among these, the city form with indicators such as density, mixed land-use, design, distance to public transportation and distance to the city center is one of the most important determining factors in the travel patterns of residents.The present study is an applied researches with 1000 sample volumes to investigate the relationship between city form indicators and socio-economic indicators as well as household travel behavior on the distance between household travel and VKT in the traffic areas of Qazvin city. In this study, statistical methods of Pearson correlation and multivariate regression have been used. The results of the analysis indicate that the variables of city form and socio-economic variables and household travel behavior affect the distance traveled by private car up to 23%, the distance traveled by the family up to 33%, and the working distance of households up to 17%. In this study, the distance to the city center (with beta coefficient of 0.217) is the most important variable of city form affecting the amount of VKT and the factor of vehicle ownership (with beta coefficient of 0.243) is the most effective economic variable on the amount of VKT