Exploring the relationships between building and transportation stocks to meet climate change mitigation goals

• Transportation stocks differ significantly by neighborhood in Trondheim. • Proximity to the city center is crucial for infrastructure stock characteristics. • High building density is associated with low car ownership and small road area. • Neighborhoods with shopping malls do not have lower car ownership. • Densification and polycentricity may be effective strategies to reduce emissions. The building and transportation sectors contribute significantly to global direct and indirect carbon emissions. However, they are often treated separately when calculating carbon emissions and devising mitigation strategies. This separation overlooks the spatial and functional relationships between building and transportation stocks. Studying their complex relationships is thus crucial for developing effective climate change mitigation strategies. Among the existing examples of research on this topic, few attempts have been made to investigate relationships between building and transportation stocks across neighborhoods at the urban scale. Here, we employ spatial analysis and correlation analysis for Trondheim, Norway, to explore the relationships between building and transportation stocks at the neighborhood level within a city. Furthermore, we conduct a cross-sectional analysis of neighborhoods at increasing distances from the city center. Our results indicate that proximity to the city center is reflected in the spatial patterns of private car ownership, building density, construction year of buildings, share of detached houses, and garage floor area per capita. Neighborhoods with low per-capita levels of total vehicles, private cars, motorcycles, and vehicle road surface areas often feature high building density, old buildings, a small proportion of detached houses, and small garage floor area per capita. Notably, our study reveals that neighborhoods with shopping malls, which have high building type diversity for all buildings, do not have low private car ownership. Our results indicate that densification and polycentric development may be effective strategies to reduce indirect carbon emissions related to material carbon emissions in Trondheim. Future research could extend beyond examining correlations between building and transportation stocks by exploring their drivers and their intensity of use.