Travel Behavior Analysis Based On Casual Inference

As the urban sprawl and people become more auto-dependency, social problems such as congestion, air pollution, energy crisis and global warming aggravate. Thus the idea of New Urbanism and Smart Growth were proposed. And the policies according to such idea all try to reduce the auto-dependency through high density development and mixed land-use. However, the results about whether the built environment affects travel behavior and to what extent it influences are mixed up to now. The most possible problem rest on the association conception that researches used to analyze the relationship between built environment and travel behavior.So this paper introduce the casual inference theory into the travel behavior analysis to form a theoretical framework for the further study. This paper show how to apply those theoretical knowledge into the "built environment-attitude-travel behavior" causality research through case analysis mostly by the Structural Causal Model (SCM). Furthermore, this paper provides the mathematical proof for the feasibility and methods of causal inference in the travel behavior analysis.