The built environment, travel attitude, and travel behavior: Residential self-selection or residential determination?

Tao Lin, Donggen Wang and Xiaodong Guan

Journal of Transport Geography, 2017, vol. 65, issue C, 111-122

Abstract: In examining the impacts of the built environment on travel behavior, studies focused on residential self-selection mostly assume that people self-select residential built environment based on their travel preferences. However, the residential self-selection hypothesis is challenged for a number of reasons including the arguments that that at least in some societies a large percentage of people do not have the privilege to self-select their residence and the built environment may have a significant influence on a person's travel attitude. To shed some light on this debate, this paper makes use of data from a household activity-diary survey conducted in Beijing, China, in 2011–2012 to examine both the hypothesis of residential self-selection and that of residential environment determination. We adopt the natural experimental approach and divide the sample into two groups based on whether or not the respondents had much freedom in regard to choosing where to live: one with the possibility of self-selection and the other one without this possibility. We found reciprocal influences between residential built environment and travel attitude/preference for the first group and influence of residential built environment on travel preferences for the second group. We argue that the complex relationships between the built environment, travel attitude, and travel behavior are featured by both residential self-selection and residential determination. Failing to acknowledge the effects of the built environment on travel attitude may lead to the overestimation of the influence of residential self-selection on the link between the built environment and travel behavior and underestimation of the influence of the built environment on travel behavior.

Keywords: The built environment; Travel attitude; Natural experiment; Residential self-selection; Residential determination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692316303775

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:65:y:2017:i:c:p:111-122

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2017.10.004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Transport Geography is currently edited by Frank Witlox

More articles in Journal of Transport Geography from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().