Residential units
are designated
highway strip if they occur along rural highways outside of town centres and the surrounding urban growth boundaries. New residential units within the delineated rural highway buffer are considered sprawling for this measure. For this study, the road was buffered by using GIS software. The existing land use data were set with Pahang Cassini-soldner projection system in order to get the precise width of the buffer area. Then, the buffer was set as 300 feet or 100 meter in the actual area, a common depth for a 1-acre (0.4-ha) residential lot. Residential units that fell within the buffer were coded to 1 and units outside the buffer were coded to zero. The municipal-level highway strip index (HS mun) was calculated by summing the number of residential units that occurred within the highway buffer and then normalizing by the total number of units that were developed within the area as depicted in Equation 1 (modified from Hasse and Lathrop, 2003):