01515281

Component

There is a long-running debate in the planning literature about the effects of built environment on travel behavior, and the degree to which apparent effects are due to the tendency of households to self select into neighborhoods that support their travel preferences. Those who want to walk will choose walkable neighborhoods, those who want to use transit will choose transit-served neighborhoods. These households might have walked or used transit more than their neighbors wherever they lived. Most previous studies have shown that individual attitudes attenuate the relationship between the residential environment and travel choices and so the effect of the built environment on travel may be overestimated. But there are other researcher who argue the reverse, claiming that residential preferences reinforce built environmental influences. This study assesses the relative importance of the built environment and residential preferences/travel attitudes for a sample of 1,104 households in the Greater Salt Lake region using structural equation modeling (SEM). For the sake of simplicity, the authors extracted two factors using principal component analysis (PCA), one representing the built environment and the other representing residential preferences/attitudes. The authors' findings are consistent with the view that the neighborhood built environment and residential preferences both influence household’s travel, that the built environment is the stronger influence, and the built environment affects travel through two causal pathways, one direct and the other indirect, through attitudes.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD30 Transportation and Land Development. Alternate title: Compact Development and Vehicle Miles Traveled: Environmental Determinism, Self-Selection, or Some of Both?

01503729

14-1350

English

15p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Attitudes; Built environment; Residential location; Smart growth; Structural equation modeling; Sustainable development; Travel behavior; Urban design; Vehicle miles of travel

Principal component analysis; Self-selection

Salt Lake City Metropolitan Area

Design; Environment; Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I15: Environment; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-1350

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:30PM