The influence of land use on travel behavior: Specification and estimation strategies

While the relationship between urban form and travel behavior is a key element of many current planning initiatives aimed at reducing car travel, the literature faces two major problems. First, this relationship is extremely complex. Second, several specification and estimation issues are poorly addressed in prior work, possibly generating biased results. We argue that many of the latter problems are overcome by systematically isolating the separable influences of urban design characteristics on travel and then properly analyzing individual-level data. We further clarify which results directly follow from alternative land use arrangements and which may or may not, and thus identify the specific hypotheses to be tested against the data. We then develop more-reliable tests of these hypotheses, and explore the implications of alternative behavioral assumptions regarding travel costs. The measured influence of land use on travel behavior is shown to be very sensitive to the form of the empirical strategy.