Assessing the Impact of Metropolitan-Level, County-Level, and Local-Level Built Environment on Travel Behavior: Evidence from 19 U.S. Urban Areas

Abstract

Research on land use and travel behavior has been mostly focused on the effects of local land use as opposed to the overall form of metropolitan area, regional employment accessibility and growth pattern, and job-housing balance in the whole metro area. The present work attempts to shed some light on the overlooked impacts of metropolitan-level built environment on travel behavior. It presents results from structural equations modeling (SEM) analysis on the basis of data from 19 metropolitan areas across the United States to construct a systematic cause-effect relationship among macrolevel land use, regional mobility, and travel behavior. The results provide evidence on the direction and magnitude of these impacts and confirm the hypothesis that changing land use policies at the neighborhood/local level alone is not followed by a significant change in people’s travel behavior towards less driving. Effective land use policies are those which consider the overall form of urban areas and the composition of jobs and services in the entire region.