TRAVEL BEHAVIOR AS A FUNCTION OF ACCESSIBILITY, LAND USE MIXING, AND LAND USE BALANCE: Evidence from the San Francisco Bay Area

Note to Readers: This paper's pagination is " off " (relative to the original and to the Table of Contents shown here), and its graphics are disfigured. These problems are due to the document's original creation in WordPerfect and later retrieval into Word 97. Please see Transportation Research Record 1607 for a short version of this paper, and please see the original thesis (at the U.C. Berkeley Libraries) for correct pagination when quoting this document directly. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks very much! By incorporating characteristics of the built environment into models of travel behavior, much can be said about household travel distances, automobile ownership, and mode choice. This research investigates the relative significance of a variety of measures of urban form, both at trip-makers' home neighborhoods and at trip ends. The travel data come from the 1990 San Francisco Bay Area Travel Surveys, and the land-use data are largely constructed from hectare-level descriptions provided by the Association of Bay Area Governments. After controlling for demographic characteristics, the measures of accessibility, land use mixing, and land use balance proved to be highly statistically significant and influential in their impact on household vehicle miles traveled (VMT), automobile ownership, and mode choice. In contrast, under the majority of models (with the important exception of the vehicle-ownership models), density's impact was 5 negligible, after controlling for accessibility. In many cases, balance, mix, and accessibility were found to be more relevant (as measured by elasticities) than several household and traveler characteristics that often form a basis for travel behavior prediction. Moreover, the apparent influence that these variables, particularly accessibility, have on travel behavior is dramatic. If a societal objective is reduced automobile use and dependence, while maintaining or improving general accessibility levels, these results lend empirical support to the promotion of a variety of land-use policies, such as regional growth containment, the raising and/or removal of density/intensity caps, and the establishment of mixed-use and flexible zoning standards throughout urban areas. These results also represent a step forward in the inclusion of measures of urban form in travel behavior forecasting models; thanks to the technology of geographical information systems and the increasing availability of detailed land-use data sets, such measures can be computed for a multitude of zones at relatively low cost.