The impact of accessibility on residential choice - empirical results of a discrete choice model

Berry Blijie ()

ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association

Abstract: Transport in general, and accessibility of people, jobs and services in particular, is assumed to have an important impact on the residential choice behavior of households. After all, the amount of activities that can be deployed by the household members, whether labor, leisure or socially correlated, is determined by the accessibility of a location. The past decades, residential location choice of households has been subject of study of many researches. Nevertheless, the relation between accessibility and residential choice has shown to be hard to verify empirically. Such (empirical) knowledge, however, can help address many of the problems that urban regions are facing nowadays, like the (re-) location of residential areas and jobs, the planning of new infrastructure and predicting the amount of traffic generated by commuting and leisure activities. The first part of this paper gives an overview of the literature on residential choice behavior, with an emphasis on research that studied the relation with accessibility. Next, the results of a discrete choice model for the residential choice behavior of households will be presented. The model is estimated on the National Housing Survey, in which over 75 thousand Dutch households were inquired on their current and previous housing situation. Different aspects of the residential choice decision are incorporated in the model, like the dwelling type, the location of the dwelling and the characteristics of the household, all in relation with the influence of accessibility. The results show that individual accessibility measures, like migration distance, commuting distance and access to public transport for households without a car, have more impact than the often used general measures like the amount of jobs within 30 minutes travel time, which is apparently the same for all inhabitants in a region.

Date: 2005-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-geo and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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