Exploring Reciprocal Influence between Individual Shopping Travel and Urban Form: Agent-Based Modeling Approach

Abstract

A large and still growing body of literature links urban form and individual travel behavior. It is claimed that certain urban forms, such as mixed land use, can reduce transportation needs for both work and nonwork trips. Despite the contribution of previous research efforts, two limitations remain and thus bring criticisms: first, the mechanism under which urban form affects individual travel behavior is inconclusive; and second, few efforts have investigated how individual daily behavior reshapes urban form over the long term. This paper proposes that urban form and individual behavior are interdependent, i.e., individual behavior reshapes the urban form and vice versa. To test this hypothesis, an agent-based simulation model is built to perform a set of exploratory experiments. The experiments use 31,250 simulations that are conducted on 50 artificial cities to investigate how individual shopping travel behavior shapes urban forms and then how different urban forms influence individual transportation needs. Simulation results indicate that changes in human preferences concerning store utilities and travel convenience exert a strong influence on individual transportation needs and, eventually, on changing the urban form. Additionally, a different explanation on the mechanism by which urban form affects individual transportation needs is given. The findings of this paper indicate human travel behavior should be considered as an important dimension of urban development studies.