Accessibility, Travel Behavior, and Urban Form Change
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- March 20, 2019
- Creator
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Merlin, Louis A.
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of City and Regional Planning
- Abstract
- Accessibility is a central concept for urban planning both from theoretical and practical perspectives. Theoretically, accessibility is a major driver of patterns of land value and residential density in metropolitan urban regions. Practically, planning for accessibility offers the opportunity to shift away from transportation planning's historic focus on mobility (speed) and towards a focus on greater land use-transportation integration. This dissertation takes as its premise that transportation planners ought to be planning for higher accessibility and traces some of its implications. Does higher regional accessibility lead to the travel patterns that planners and travel behavior researchers expect? How are US metropolitan regions performing with regard to an accessibility-based performance benchmark over time? There is broad consensus among transportation researchers that accessibility measures indicate the ease of access to opportunities across space. Theoretically, we expect households in such high accessibility areas to travel less in distance on a per trip basis, but with greater trip frequency and with a greater range of choices than similar households in lower accessibility areas. This dissertation explores the connection between high accessibility locations and such types of travel patterns. In specific, two of the three dissertation papers explore the accessibility-travel behavior relationship: Measuring Complete Communities and Does Accessibility Influence Activity Participation? These two papers ask what types of built environments are associated with more localized travel and more frequent travel. Interestingly, both of these papers find that local accessibility may be more important for supporting these desired travel patterns than regional accessibility. Furthermore, if planners should be planning for higher regional accessibility for households, how are metropolitan planning agencies performing based upon this metric? This is the question asked by the third dissertation paper, Changing Accessibility in US Metropolitan Areas. This paper examines the accessibility performance of four contrasting metropolitan areas over time. Changing travel times are found to have a greater influence over accessibility change than changing urban forms. Tracking accessibility change over time provides planners with an alternative view of urban sprawl; metros with lowering accessibility are presumably providing decreased access to opportunity for their residents over time.
- Date of publication
- May 2014
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- Song, Yan
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Graduation year
- 2014
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