Built Environment and Spatiotemporal Traffic Congestion Patterns: A Systematic Review

ABSTRACT

Advances in understanding the interactions between the built environment (BE) and traffic spatiotemporal congestion patterns (TCPs) have significantly contributed to sustainable transportation development. However, existing BE‐TCP studies remain fragmented in terms of measurement, built environment indicators, spatial scale and methodology selection, which restrict cross‐study comparability and policy generalization. To address these gaps, this review systematically analyses 214 papers collected from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar published between 1997 and 2025. This review makes three main contributions. First, it synthesizes the BE measurement from the conventional 5Ds framework (density, diversity, design, distance to transit, and destination accessibility) to an expanded 7Ds by incorporating two additional dimensions: demand management and demographics. Second, it identifies four hierarchical geospatial scales of BE‐TCP relationships—disaggregated, neighborhood, aggregated, and regional scales, and highlights the scale‐dependent nature of BE‐TCP effects. Third, it summarizes the methodological evolution from classical linear to spatial nonlinear, from direct to mediation, from singular to synergic, from static to dynamic, and from correlation to causality approaches. The review reveals that BE‐TCP relationships are not uniform but are characterized by strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity, multi‐scale effects, and regional dependence. Based on these advances, three critical challenges and four opportunities are proposed. Overall, this review highlights the need to move BE‐TCP research from fragmented empirical associations toward spatiotemporal, multiscale, and context‐sensitive explanations that can better support transferable and locally adaptive policy‐making.