Stay local or go regional? Urban form effects on vehicle use at different spatial scales: A theoretical concept and its application to the San Francisco Bay Area

Title

Stay local or go regional? Urban form effects on vehicle use at different spatial scales: A theoretical concept and its application to the San Francisco Bay Area

 Author

Milakis, D.
Cervero, R.
Van Wee, G.P.

Date

2015-06-19

 Abstract

This paper explores the respective roles of local and regional characteristics of urban form on vehicle travel. We hypothesize that the effects of urban form on vehicle use at the local and regional levels are complementary, and we introduce the concept of local and regional action spaces, which are defined based on the accessibility of alternative means of transport within an acceptable travel time, to test this hypothesis. Multilevel and ordered logit models are developed for the San Francisco Bay Area to estimate the effects of urban form and socioeconomic characteristics on vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) and vehicle trip frequency (for work, shopping, and social/recreational purposes). We find that the two urban scale characteristics exert complementary effects on VKT. However, because people in the San Francisco Bay Area display significantly lower VKT in the local than in the regional action space, we conclude that regional-scale interventions would contribute more to the policy objective of VKT reduction, although local-scale design policies might also help reach this policy goal. Intersection density (for the local action space models) and regional jobs accessibility (for the regional action space models) demonstrated the strongest and most significant relationships with VKT. The built environment did not appear to significantly affect vehicle trip frequency, which is likely due to the uniformly high levels of vehicle use in both the local and regional action spaces in the area.

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:366fd051-8219-48b7-935a-9c4131da1c65

 Publisher

University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies

 ISSN

1938-7849

 Source

https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.2015.557

 Source

Journal of Transport and Land Use, 8 (2), 2015

 Part of collection

Institutional Repository

 Document type

journal article

 Rights

(c) 2015 The Author(s)
Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial License 3.0
Files
PDF 319232.pdf 1.31 MB
Close viewer