Excess Commuting and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem

Mark W. Horner and Alan T. Murray
Additional contact information
Mark W. Horner: Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, 1036 Derby Hall, Columbus, OH 43210-1361, USA, horner.38@osu.edu a
Alan T. Murray: Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, 1036 Derby Hall, Columbus, OH 43210, murray.308@osu.edu

Urban Studies, 2002, vol. 39, issue 1, 131-139

Abstract: Excess commuting has emerged during the past two decades as an important construct for evaluating the spatial relationships between employment and residential locations. During this time-period, there has been an on-going debate regarding how one should measure excess commuting in urban regions. This paper contributes to the debate by focusing on the spatial issues inherent in excess commuting evaluation. We demonstrate how scale and unit definition (the modifiable areal unit problem) are manifested in the assessment of excess commuting, both in theoretical and empirical terms. To this end, a geographical information systems-based analysis is presented which explores spatial sensitivities in the excess commuting measure. Our results show that aggregation and spatial unit definition may have profound impacts on the estimation of excess commuting. This work provides a formal resolution to much of the recent debate regarding estimates of excess commuting in urban regions.

Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420980220099113 (text/html)

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:sae:urbstu:v:39:y:2002:i:1:p:131-139

DOI: 10.1080/00420980220099113

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().