Disparities in access to sustainable dining options across the Tokyo Metropolis

In contemporary cities, dining out has become an indispensable part of urban lifestyles, yet access to nutritious, affordable, and low-impact meal options remains unevenly distributed. Prior work has documented spatial clustering of restaurants around transit hubs, but few studies have quantified how variations in nutritional quality, environmental burden, price competitiveness, crowding, and diversity combine to shape residents’ everyday food environments. Such gaps hinder evidence-based planning of equitable, health-promoting, and sustainable urban dining systems.

This study develops an analytical framework and introduces the Sustainable Dining-Out Index (SDOI) to assess, map, and optimize the sustainability of dining-out environments. Drawing on 112,892 restaurant Point of Interests (POI) entries across Tokyo’s 23 wards and menu data for 3,649 dishes, five dimensions are evaluated within 500 m vicinities of each railway station: (1) average dish nutritional quality; (2) life-cycle CO₂ emissions (estimated via input-output analysis); (3) price competitiveness; (4) crowding intensity; and (5) diversity of restaurant types. Each metric is normalized and aggregated into the SDOI, enabling station-, line-, and ward-level visualization of sustainable dining access.

Spatial analysis uncovers marked inequities. Stations in central business wards (Chiyoda, Minato, Shinjuku) exhibit high restaurant density and diversity, yielding high SDOI scores, but suffer from weaker price competitiveness that limits access for lower-income groups. Peripheral stations (e.g., Kita-Ayase, Kotake-Mukaihara, Kitasenju) offer lower prices yet lack diversity and score poorly on nutrition and environmental metrics (SDOI 0.31–0.39). Besides, line-level analysis shows inner-city routes (e.g., Ginza Line) concentrate high-SDOI stations, while outer lines present fragmented access. Ward-level mapping finds Chiyoda tops all dimensions, whereas Setagaya contains scattered low-SDOI areas due to rail and restaurant distributions.

These inequities stem from Tokyo’s Transit-Oriented Development, which shape local dining environments, exposing an estimated 9 million daily passenger trips to unsustainable dining options. Optimization scenarios indicate that modest interventions, diversifying restaurant types and adjusting price tiers, can boost station SDOI up at minimal cost, offering transferable strategies for planners to enhance equitable, sustainable urban dining. The SDOI framework and associated scenario analyses provide transferable tools for urban planners and policymakers to diagnose spatial food-environment inequities and design interventions that promote healthier, lower-impact dining systems in Tokyo and other metropolitan areas.

Figure | Framework for sustainable dining out analysis and optimization.
The flowchart outlines data collection, processing and multidimensional evaluation of SDOI (nutrition, price, environment, crowdedness, diversity), followed by a mixed-integer linear programming model to optimize dining out sustainability in station vicinities. IDW, inverse distance weighting.