Impact of Metropolitan-level Built Environment on Travel Behavior

摘要

There has been a growing recognition about the significant impact of land use pattern on travelbehavior and changes in built environment pattern could potentially be considered as a long-termsolution to change people’s travel behavior and especially vehicle miles traveled (VMT).However, the existing literature has been mainly focused on local and neighborhoodcharacteristics of the built environment and little is known about the unique or relative influenceof the metropolitan-level built environment. In this empirical analysis we use an extensivedatabase for six major metropolitan areas in the United States to employ multilevel mixed effectmodel highlighting the impact of built environment characteristics on travel behavior at differentscales.Our findings show that changes in built environment measures not only at local andneighborhood levels but also at larger metropolitan and regional levels could be very influentialin changing people’s travel behavior. Specifically, promoting compact, mixed-use builtenvironment with well-connected street network can help to reduce VMT and thus provide bettersolutions to transportation-related issues such as traffic congestion, air pollution, and high energyconsumption.