Urban Spatial Structure and the Potential for Vehicle Miles Traveled Reduction: The Effects of Accessibility to Jobs within and beyond Employment Sub-centers

Marlon G. Boarnet and Xize Wang
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Marlon G. Boarnet: University of Southern California
Xize Wang: University of California, Berkeley

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Abstract: This research examines the relationship between urban polycentric spatial structure and driving. We identified 46 employment sub-centers in the Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area and calculated access to jobs that are within and beyond these sub-centers. To address potential endogeneity problems, we use access to historically important places and transportation infrastructure in the early 20th century as instrumental variables for job accessibility indices. Our Two-stage Tobit models show that access to jobs is negatively associated with household vehicle miles traveled in this region. Among various accessibility measures, access to jobs outside sub-centers has the largest elasticity (-0.155). We examine the location of places in the top quintile of access to non-centered jobs and find that those locations are often inner ring suburban developments, near the core of the urban area and not far from sub-centers, suggesting that strategies of infill development that fill in the gaps between sub-centers, rather than focusing on already accessible downtowns and large sub-centers, may be the best land use approach to reduce VMT.

Date: 2022-06
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Published in The Annals of Regional Science, 62(2), 381-404 (2019)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2206.12613

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