Are the neighborhood commercial areas of Iskandar Malaysia centrally located for low carbon travel?

Abstract

Recent developments in Malaysia show that the amount of CO2 increases every year which is mainly contributed by transportation sectors (World Bank, 2008). The amount of travel-induced carbon emission can be reduced by minimizing unnecessary extra travel coverage that can result from inefficient location of oft-frequented places such as the commercial centres. Thus, this paper discusses on the centrality assessment of the commercial areas within selected neighborhoods in Iskandar Malaysia. It looks at the distribution of commercial areas within the neighborhoods and evaluating the centrality of street networks in relation to these commercial areas. The selected neighborhoods are representative of existing neighborhoods within Iskandar Malaysia built across five decades from 1970s to 2010s. According to Bevelas (1948), centrality in communication network is basically represented by a point to some extend that the point has the shortest path to the other point that is in the network. Centrality measures indicate that some of the nodes contained in an urban network are more significant especially the nodes that are located at the center of the network rather than the rest (Porta, Crucitti and Latora, 2006).