Employment Subcenters, Polycentricity, and Travel Behavior: The Tale of Two Cities in the U.S.

摘要

This paper investigates the influence of spatial distribution of employment centers on travel behavior using data from two large metropolitan areas: Atlanta, GA, and Phoenix, AZ. Up-to-date fine-grained land-use data and a consistent GIS-based framework were employed to first identify regional employment subcenters and statistical models were developed to analyze the travel outcomes of employment subcenters. Results suggest that a polycentric urban form encourages transit mode choice more than monocentric pattern especially when transit accessibility is improved in polycentric pattern. We found evidence that trips ending in subcenters are shorter and have a higher probability of transit mode choice compared to trips originating from or destined to the city center. These findings suggest that any form of employment concentration would be more efficient in multiple smaller clusters distributed throughout the entire region rather than in a single large cluster.