Traffic congestion is an ever-increasing issue across urban environments in the US. One potential mitigation strategy is to improve our understanding of how the geographical patterns of urban land use influence congestion. Unfortunately, there is no consensus regarding if more sprawling or dense urban morphologies help mitigate congestion issues. To potentially clarify the conflicting findings of previous studies, we used a detailed spatial metric-based approach and panel regression to quantify the relationships between urban development patterns and congestion in 98 US urban areas from 2001 to 2011. We found that the abundance and spatial configuration of urban land uses were correlated with traffic congestion. Specifically, high degrees of polycentricity for both high-intensity and low-intensity urban land uses were associated with more congestion, while contiguous residential development was correlated with less congestion. Important distinctions were also observed between different congestion measures, as urban morphology exhibited a more substantial influence on overall congestion than rush-hour congestion. Our findings can potentially inform future land use planning by clarifying which urban morphologies alleviate traffic congestion issues.

交通拥堵是美国城市环境中日益严重的问题。一种潜在的缓解策略是提高我们对城市土地利用的地理模式如何影响拥堵的理解。不幸的是，对于更庞大或更密集的城市形态是否有助于缓解拥堵问题，尚未达成共识。为了潜在地澄清先前研究中相互矛盾的发现，我们使用基于空间度量的详细方法和面板回归来量化 2001 年至 2011 年美国 98 个城市地区的城市发展模式与拥堵之间的关系。我们发现，丰富度和空间配置城市土地利用与交通拥堵有关。具体来说，高强度和低强度城市土地使用的高度多中心性与更多的拥堵相关，而连续的住宅开发与更少的拥堵相关。还观察到不同拥堵措施之间的重要区别，因为与高峰时段拥堵相比，城市形态对总体拥堵的影响更大。我们的研究结果可以通过阐明哪些城市形态缓解交通拥堵问题来潜在地为未来的土地使用规划提供信息。