Modeling the Effect of Land Use on Activity Spaces

Historically, research that has analyzed the effect of land use on travel demand has concentrated on a few key indicators, notably, mode choice, vehicle miles traveled, and number of trips. This literature has focused primarily on the effects of individual land use variables; for example, what is the effect of land use mix or population density on mode choice? It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the isolated impact of particular measures of land use on individual and household transportation behavior is small, but when these measures are dealt with by using a clustered approach, their combined influence becomes less ambiguous in direction and greater in magnitude. This paper contributes to the transportation and land use literature by examining the effect of clusters of land use indicators on activity spaces, an emerging but traditionally ignored indicator of transportation behavior. Regression analysis results point to a significant relationship between large and dispersed activity spaces, low levels of population and employment density, and low levels of public transit accessibility and land use mix.