Relationships between neighborhood-scale urban form, travel behavior, and residential location: Implications for land use and transportation planning and policy

Communities nationwide are relying on land use planning strategies to address issues of automobile dependence and its consequences. The planning strategies recommend increasing neighborhood accessibility by striving for: compact development, a fine grain mix of land uses, and urban design provisions (e.g., sidewalks, small block size).; This research makes important progress in our ability to understand relationships between urban form and travel. Using accessibility as the tenet that bonds urban form and travel, the central questions addressed are: (a) how does urban form influence travel behavior? and (b) can the information gleaned from such relationships better inform the prospects of using land use planning policy to moderate travel? To do so, this research relies on quantitative measures representing a household's travel behavior and household characteristics using data from the Puget Sound Transportation Panel. Detailed measures of neighborhood access are derived from three dimensions: density, land use mix, and block size.; This dissertation employs four different research approaches. The first two use regression models on cross-sectional data to analyze relationships between urban form and household trip information (e.g., distance, frequency, mode) and tour information (frequency and complexity). Major findings from the cross-sectional analysis suggest that neighborhood access is positively related to trip and tour frequencies (vehicle, transit, walking) and negatively related to travel distance and tour complexity. The third research approach uses the panel nature of the data to examine how travel behavior changes when households move to neighborhoods with higher (or lower) neighborhood access, controlling for rival explanations of travel. Findings from this section suggest that households who move to neighborhoods with higher access do not change their vehicle trip frequencies, but travel shorter distances and make more tours. In the fourth research approach, household measures of neighborhood type, travel characteristics, activity frequency, and auto ownership are analyzed in a combined manner. Using factor analysis and then cluster analysis, this approach uncovers nine distinct lifestyles. This is unique in research related to urban form-travel because these phenomena are jointly analyzed. Each of the lifestyle clusters are representative of the variety of preferences that explain where households live and how they travel.