Varying Influences of the Built Environment on Household Travel in Nine Diverse Regions of the United States

摘要

This study pools household travel and built environment data from nine diverse U.S. regions toproduce travel models with more external validity than any to date. It uses a large number ofconsistently defined built environmental variables to predict five household travel outcomes—auto trips, walk trips, bike trips, transit trips, and vehicle miles traveled (VMT). It employsmulti-level modeling to account for the dependence of households in the same region on sharedregional characteristics. It estimates “hurdle” models to account for the excess number of zerovalues in the distributions of dependent variables such as household transit trips. It tests builtenvironment variables for three different buffer widths around household locations to see whichscale best explains travel behavior. The resulting models are appropriate for post processingoutputs of conventional travel demand models, and for sketch planning applications in trafficimpact analysis, climate action planning, and health impact assessment.