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.
Sharma et al. (2026) studied this question.