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Quantifying Spatial Characteristics of Cities

Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Pierce Hall 117, Harvard University, 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA, sumeeta{at}deas.harvard.edu

Land-use initiatives represent a potentially effective tool for coping with the kinds of mobility pattern that North American cities faced in the 1990s and still face in the present century. As fine-grained data about land use and travel activity become available, they provide the opportunity to improve our understanding of the linkage between land use and transport. This paper examines in detail the neighbourhood characteristics that could affect mode choice on the work and non-work tour. Neighbourhood characteristics include land use, network and accessibility-related characteristics which are quantified through the use of geographical information systems (GIS). Ultimately, such measures could be used in conjunction with detailed surveys of travel behaviour to specify, calibrate and use models of modal choice and residential choice that are more sensitive to the fine-grained spatial structure of neighbourhoods and transport corridors in metropolitan areas. Micro-level data for the Boston metro area, together with a 1991 activity survey of approximately 10 000 residents, provide a rich empirical basis for experimenting with relevant neighbourhood measures and for simulating the effects on travel behaviour. We find that spatial characteristics do affect mode choice, both for the relatively (spatially) restricted non-work tour and the work tour.

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