Community design and how much we drive

Wesley Marshall () and Norman Garrick ()
Additional contact information
Wesley Marshall: University of Colorado Denver
Norman Garrick: University of Connecticut

The Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2012, vol. 5, issue 2, 5-21

Abstract: The preponderance of evidence suggests that denser and more connected communities with a higher degree of mixed land uses results in fewer vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT). However, there is less agreement as the size of the effect. Also, there is no clear understanding as to the aspects of community design that are most important in contributing to lower VKT. One reason why there is some confusion on this point is that past studies have not always made a clear distinction between different community and street network design characteristics such as density, connectivity, and configuration. In this research, care was taken to fully characterize the different features of the street network including a street pattern classification system that works at the neighborhood level but also focuses on the citywide street network as a separate entity. We employ a spatial kriging analysis of NHTS data in combination with a generalized linear regression model in order to examine the extent to which community design and land use influence VKT in 24 California cities of populations from 30,000 to just over 100,000. Our results suggest that people living in denser street network designs tended to drive less. Connectivity, however, played an adverse role in performance.

Keywords: community design; land use mix; street network; National Household Travel Survey; spatial kriging analysis; vehicle kilometers traveled (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/download/301/246 Full text (application/pdf)

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:ris:jtralu:0079

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Transport and Land Use is currently edited by David M. Levinson

More articles in The Journal of Transport and Land Use from Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Arlene Mathison ().