Mobility and urban form effects on air quality in New York City

This study presents an integrated framework for assessing the interdependent impacts of urban mobility, land use, walkability, and air pollution on environmental outcomes in New York City. It offers a holistic approach to understanding how urban form and transportation choices shape air quality patterns. We evaluated optimized routes across five scenarios (Car, Electric Car, Transit + Active, Multimodal Baseline, and Multimodal Complete Streets) under alternative time-emissions weightings. The analysis demonstrates that multimodal transport scenarios consistently outperform car-dominated alternatives: while the introduction of electric vehicles and congestion-driven speed improvements contributes to lower emissions (−47.5%), more integrated modes of transportation provide greater benefits in combined optimizations for time and emissions (up to −91.3%)—reduction by an idealized policy horizon under a complete streets framework. The study demonstrates the value of evaluating these dimensions jointly rather than in isolation and offers a replicable framework for planners and policymakers to support targeted interventions.