Andrew Mondschein

Accessibility and Cognition: The Effect of Transport Mode on Spatial Knowledge

Spatial behaviour and decision-making require knowledge of the urban environment, including opportunities available and the means to reach them. Thus, variations in spatial knowledge can result in radically different levels of effective accessibility, despite similar locations, demographics and other factors commonly thought to influence travel behaviour. Cognitive maps, which develop primarily through wayfinding and travel experience, are individuals’ repositories of spatial knowledge. This paper examines whether differences in cognitive maps can be explained, in part, by variations in travel mode. Adults were surveyed in two Los Angeles neighbourhoods with relatively low auto use and high transit use. The data show that spatial knowledge does indeed vary with previous experience with travel modes.

Cognitive Mapping, Travel Behavior, and Access to Opportunity

In this paper we combine theoretical and empirical research on cognitive mapping with our own initial research on the topic to suggest how cognitive mapping might be employed to help us better understand and predict travel behavior, emphasizing how spatial cognition shapes access to opportunity. We argue that the path-based, cumulative process of spatial learning, during which the cognitive map develops primarily through wayfinding and travel experience, affects accessibility by determining whether and how destinations are encoded into a person’s cognitive map. Variations in cognitive mapping, spatial knowledge, and resultant travel behavior can vary between individuals or among groups in systematic ways. Some of these differences are related directly to previous travel experience, including experience with various travel modes. Such variations in spatial knowledge can result in different levels of functional accessibility, despite ostensibly similar locations, demographics, and other factors commonly thought to influence travel behavior. Our initial survey of residents in three Los Angeles neighborhoods suggests that cognitive mapping is indeed influenced by neighborhood and travel mode experience, in addition to demographic characteristics. Such modally constructed cognitive maps, which are likely to vary systematically by both location and socio-economic status, may affect perceptions of activity opportunities in ways that travel behavior researchers are only beginning to understand. To a carless job seeker, job opportunities not easily reached by transit are effectively out of reach and even transparent. Modally constructed cognitive maps, in other words, are key to understanding both travel behavior and accessibility in cities.

Does traffic congestion influence the location of new business establishments? An analysis of the San Francisco Bay Area:

Chronic traffic congestion is widely assumed to negatively affect regional economic performance, but this assumption has been only lightly tested. We examine the traffic congestion–economic performance link using data for the San Francisco Bay Area and find that the effect of traffic on the regional economy may be both less significant and more nuanced than is widely assumed. Our analysis examines how traffic congestion affects the location of new business establishments in six industries: advertising, biotechnology, computer systems design, information technology manufacturing, securities, and, as a control, groceries & supermarkets. New business establishments are a key driver of economic performance because they account for the majority of job creation in the USA. We find little evidence that traffic levels affect the location of new establishments in the Bay Area, and when we do observe an effect it is a positive one; that is, after controlling for a wide array of factors known to influence firm location, new firms are often more likely to start up in already congested areas. This does not mean that traffic congestion attracts new firms, but instead that the access advantages new firms accrue from clustering near same-industry firms strongly outweigh the added impedance of traffic congestion in these built-up areas of agglomeration.