Public transportation adoption requires a paradigm shift in urban development structure Tolga Ercan a , Nuri C. Onat b , Omer Tatari a, * , Jean-Denis Mathias c a Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, USA b Department of Industrial Engineering, Istanbul Sehir University, Istanbul, 34662, Turkey c Irstea, UR LISC, Centre de Clermont-Ferrand, F-63178, Aubi ere, France article info Article history: Received 6 September 2016 Received in revised form 7 November 2016 Accepted 17 November 2016 Available online xxx Keywords: Transportation mode choice Urban development System dynamics Transportation emissions Multivariate sensitivity analysis abstract Urban passenger transportation in the U.S. has been heavily dependent on car modes, mainly due to prevailing trends in urban development. However, transportation mode choice studies are currently limited to micro-level and regional-level boundaries, lacking of presenting a complete picture of the issues and the root causes associated with urban passenger transportation choices in the U.S. To this end, further analysis from a system perspective is required to investigate the interdependencies among system parameters more thoroughly, thus revealing the underlying mechanisms contributing or causing the low public transportation use in the U.S. Hence, system dynamics modeling approach is utilized to capture complex causal relationships among the critical system parameters affecting public trans- portation ridership in the U.S. as well as to identify possible policy areas to improve public transportation ridership rates. Considering the high degree of uncertainties inherent to the problem, multivariate sensitivity analysis is utilized to explore the effectiveness of existing and possible policy implications up to the year 2050 in the terms of their potential to increase transit ridership and locating critical pa- rameters that influences the most on mode choice and emission rates. Transportation mode choice behavior is projected to change slightly and reach up to a maximum of 7.25% of public transportation ridership until 2050. Analysis results reveal that the effects of trip length and rate are by far the most influential factors. Both parameters are 99% sensitive compared to all other factors including the effects of fuel tax policies, federal funds for public transportation, use of alternative green bus technologies, increasing private vehicle occupancy rates, etc. on negative environmental, economic, and social impacts of transportation. This finding highlights how important urban structures are to secure the future of public transportation in the U.S. as the existing urban structures and the shared-idea in the minds of the society about how urban transportation should be (the prevailing paradigm) are the root causes of excessive trip generation and increasing average trip lengths. Thus a paradigm-shift, a radical change in the shared-idea in the minds of the society about existing urban structures, is needed. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 1. Introduction Urbanization in the U.S. has been rapidly increasing since World War II, but sustainable urban development was not considered as an applicable concept with respect to smart growth initiatives until Clean Air Act Amendments declaration (Bento et al., 2005). Therefore, urban passenger transportation in the U.S. has since become greatly dependent on private vehicle use, as demonstrated consistently by the results of the National Household Travel Surveys (NHTS) (1990, 1995, 2001, and 2009) for U.S. households (Santos et al., 2011). For instance, the average number of vehicle ownership per household increased from 1.77 in 1990 to 1.86 in 2009, and 23% of the surveyed households owned 3 or more ve- hicles in 2009 (Santos et al., 2011). As a result of this car mode dependency, the level of motorization is significantly higher on average in the U.S. compared to the average motorization of Europe (EU27), where there are 477 light-duty vehicles (2 axles - 4 tires) for every one thousand people in Europe, whereas the corresponding number for the U.S. is 763 light-duty vehicles for every one thou- sand people (European Commission, 2011). Moreover, the high dependency on private vehicles in the U.S. has significant * Corresponding author. E-mail address: tatari@ucf.edu (O. Tatari). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.11.109 0959-6526/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Journal of Cleaner Production xxx (2016) 1e11 Please cite this article in press as: Ercan, T., et al., Public transportation adoption requires a paradigm shift in urban development structure, Journal of Cleaner Production (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.11.109