Assessing the role of the built environment and sociodemographic characteristics on walking travel distances in Bogotá

Luis A. Guzman, Javier Peña and Juan Antonio Carrasco

Journal of Transport Geography, 2020, vol. 88, issue C

Abstract: Planning for more sustainable mobility is an important goal for public authorities worldwide. Setting better conditions for pedestrians and cyclists has been related to many social benefits, such as less pollution and congestion. Local authorities, aware of the relationship between transport and land-use, are adopting planning tools to analyze growth in cities and their impacts using multiple indicators. This paper develops an econometric trip length model that correlates socioeconomic characteristics and built environment conditions with walking travel distances in the city of Bogotá, Colombia. A log-linear regression model was estimated using information for 2015 of Bogotá's household travel survey, along with data of employment and population by block obtained from official sources. The built environment component of the model serves to evaluate the effect of land-use patterns. A proof of concept was developed using land-use information extracted from a Cellular Automata Land-Use model calibrated for the city. From its results, some factors of the built environment were estimated and two scenarios were tested in this study. One depicts the average walking distance for households surveyed in 2015, and the other takes a simulation of land-use policy in developing a new urban area as an input. The results indicate that people living in areas were the land-use mix and job/population ratio are low, tend to have longer walking distances, suggesting the need to implement special policies that reallocate some activities and encourage higher land-use mix in the urban periphery where low-income households tend to be located. The proposed method can identify the impact of land-use policies in the distances traveled by walking, facilitating the impact assessment of land-use regulations.

Keywords: Walking; Land-use; Cellular automata; Built environment; Urban planning; Bogotá (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692319310786

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:88:y:2020:i:c:s0966692319310786

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2020.102844

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 ().