Mining urban sustainable performance: Millions of GPS data reveal high-emission travel attraction in Tokyo

Sustainable performance assessment has received extensive attention in the fields of transportation, energy management, and urban planning. Given that transportation has become a leading component of urban greenhouse gas emissions, combining sustainable performance assessment with transportation emissions is crucial to urban sustainability. In this study, pointed at the unbalance between urban development and transportation accessibility among urban central activities zones, a metric named potential traffic attraction is proposed based on improved gravitational model to measure urban sustainable performance. Meanwhile, the correlation between the traffic attraction and the high-emission traffic is generated via GPS trajectories, which could ensure the credibility of high-emission travel mode for the correlation model. Based on the obtained urban sustainable performance, the status of the central activities zones development in Tokyo(Japan) was analyzed, finally, several corresponding strategies in different sustainable development status were proposed. Our study demonstrated that the integration of both urban development and transportation owns tremendous capabilities for reducing vehicle emissions, and it could provide specific guidelines for urban planning and transportation policies on urban sustainable development. •Potential traffic attraction is proposed for urban sustainable performance assessment.•Millions of trajectories data are adopted for vehicle emissions calculation.•Impact of urban sustainable performance on high-emission traffic is confirmed.•Status of central activities zones development is identified for emissions reduction.