Daniel G. Chatman

Does TOD Need the T

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Transit-oriented developments (TODs) often consist of new housing near rail stations. Channeling urban growth into such developments is intended in part to reduce the climate change, pollution, and congestion caused by driving. But new housing might be expected to attract more affluent households that drive more, and rail access might have smaller effects on auto ownership and use than housing tenure and size, parking availability, and the neighborhood and subregional built environments. I surveyed households in northern New Jersey living within two miles of 10 rail stations about their housing age and type, access to off-street parking, work and non-work travel patterns, demographics, and reasons for choosing their neighborhoods. The survey data were geocoded and joined to on-street parking data from a field survey, along with neighborhood and subregional built environment measures. I analyzed how these factors were correlated with automobile ownership and use as reported in the survey. Auto ownership, commuting, and grocery trip frequency were substantially lower among households living in new housing near rail stations compared to those in new households farther away. But rail access does little to explain this fact. Housing type and tenure, local and subregional density, bus service, and particularly off- and on-street parking availability, play a much more important role. Takeaway for practice: Transportation and land use planners should broaden their efforts to develop dense, mixed-use, low-parking housing beyond rail station areas. This could be both more influential and less expensive than a development policy oriented around rail. Research support: Data collection and initial research were funded under contract with the New Jersey Department of Transportation.

HOW DENSITY AND MIXED USES AT THE WORKPLACE AFFECT PERSONAL COMMERCIAL TRAVEL AND COMMUTE MODE CHOICE

A high density of shops and services near the workplace may make it easier to carry out personal commercial activities on foot before, during, and after work, enabling reduced vehicle use during the rest of the day. Investigating this question is an important addition to the current research, which has focused on residential neighborhoods. Data from the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey are used to investigate the influence of workplace employment density and share of retail employment on commute mode choice and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) to access personal commercial activities. The analysis controls for socioeconomic characteristics and accounts for the endogeneity of commute mode choice and personal commercial VMT by employing a joint logit-Tobit model. Employment density at the workplace is found to be associated with a lower likelihood of automobile commuting and reduced personal commercial VMT, while the presence of employment in the retail category does not play a significant role. Workplace density is more clearly related to reduced VMT and automobile commuting than to characteristics of workers’ residential neighborhoods and could have significant influences on personal commercial VMT and automobile commuting when increasing over a large area. The results suggest that land use planners should focus on encouraging employment density to a greater extent than is the current practice, although further research is needed on the role played by correlated factors such as higher parking costs, increased road congestion, and better transit service.

Immigrants and Travel Demand in the United States: Implications for Transportation Policy and Future Research

Immigrants account for a majority of recent urban population growth in the United States, and for much economic growth as well. This is expected to continue for the next several decades. The foreign-born are much more likely to use transit, carpool, walk, and bicycle, particularly in their first few years of living in the United States. These trends represent challenges and opportunities for transportation and land use planners to increase the environmental sustainability of population growth, use existing transportation systems to their maximum efficiency, and support economic development. But doing so depends on anticipating the travel demands of varying immigrant groups, and those demands in turn depend on their employment and residential location choices. The authors present the most current data available on these trends, summarize research literature, and identify the major research questions needing answers to understand how to accommodate the travel demands of immigration-driven population growth.

Do Public Transport Improvements Increase Agglomeration Economies? A Review of Literature and an Agenda for Research

Public transport improvements may increase economic productivity if they enable the growth and densification of cities, downtowns, or industrial clusters and thereby increase external agglomeration economies. It has been argued that the potential agglomeration benefits are large; if so, understanding them better would be useful in making funding decisions about public transport improvements. We reviewed theoretical and empirical literature on agglomeration as well as a small number of articles on transportations role in agglomeration. The theoretical literature is useful in understanding possible avenues by which transportation improvements might affect agglomeration, although there is little discussion of public transport specifically. Relevant empirical studies tend to focus on metropolitan regions and use a generalized measure of transportation cost. But public transport impacts on agglomeration are likely to be different from road investment impacts. We identified several ways of conducting research building on this literature that would help evaluate the agglomeration impacts of public transport proposals: tracing the links between transport, agglomeration, and productivity; better motivating research using theories of agglomeration mechanisms; taking scale and redistribution into account; exploring the functional form of agglomeration economies; accounting for endogeneity in model structure; and considering development context.

Transit Service, Physical Agglomeration and Productivity in US Metropolitan Areas

Public transit improvements could cause more clustered and higher-density employment and enable urban growth, giving rise to agglomeration economies by improving labour market accessibility, increasing information exchange and facilitating industrial specialisation. Using data on US metropolitan areas, this paper traces the links from transit service to central city employment density, urbanised area employment density and population; and from these physical agglomeration measures to average wages and per capita GMP. Significant indirect productivity effects of transit service are found. For example, in the case of central city employment density, estimated wage increases range between

How will smart growth land-use policies affect travel? A theoretical discussion on the importance of residential sorting

1.5 million and

Emerging Planning Challenges in Retail: The Case of Wal-Mart

1.8 billion per metropolitan area yearly for a 10 per cent increase in transit seats or rail service miles per capita. Firms and households likely receive unanticipated agglomeration benefits from transit-induced densification and growth, and current benefit–cost evaluations may therefore underestimate the benefits of improving transit service, particularly in large cities with existing transit networks.

The transportation-credit mortgage: a post-mortem

Do policies to encourage compact, mixed use, pedestrian-friendly land-use patterns reduce driving? Not necessarily. Understanding how the built environment affects travel patterns is complex, not least because households may choose their neighborhoods on the basis of how they expect to get around. Some scholars have argued that ignoring this process of residential sorting, or ‘self-selection’, causes overestimates of built-environment influences and leads to false optimism about the efficacy of land-use policies in influencing travel. But others have suggested that residential self-selection provides a strong argument for using land-use policies to expand the supply of development that may facilitate lower automobile use. We argue that previous work on both sides of the argument has neglected to think through the myriad ways that residential choice could affect estimates of built-environment effects. In this paper we provide a more rigorous theory of residential self-selection, identifying a set of five household, market, and policy factors that are critical to understanding the residential self-selection problem, along with research questions that correspond to these factors. We explain why observed relationships between travel and the built environment could be misleading, causing either overestimates or underestimates, depending on the nature and context of residential choice. We illustrate with scenarios that show how different plausible assumptions about residential choice will bias, in different directions, estimates of the built environments effects on travel; and we argue the need for research to focus not just on those independent estimates but, critically, upon the market and policy context that influences residential sorting.

Firm Births, Access to Transit, and Agglomeration in Portland, Oregon, and Dallas, Texas

Abstract The future growth of the worlds largest company hinges on its “supercenter” format, a bold evolution that made it the nations largest grocer in a few short years. While proposals for big-box retail have long involved politically sensitive tradeoffs for planners, supercenters bring these into sharp focus by concentrating substantial wage impacts on one group, grocery workers. With much at stake—we estimate direct impacts of hundreds of millions of dollars on each side in the San Francisco region alone—these battles promise to be more intense and challenging than in the past. Yet many regulatory strategies are weakly rationalized, poorly targeted, and legally untested. We clarify key policy questions and offer a case study as a model for understanding the extent and character of expected tradeoffs between winners and losers. In the end, our analysis supports planning strategies explicitly aimed at mitigating costs while leveraging benefits. This will require a thorough assessment of each proposed stores costs and benefits in order to provide a clearer rationale for when super-centers should be approved, denied, or mitigated. Such an approach permits planners to do what they do best: inform, mediate, and resolve.

Immigrants and Automobility in New Jersey: The Role of Spatial and Occupational Factors in Commuting to Work

“Location-efficient mortgages” and “smart commute mortgages” were sponsored by Fannie Mae and made available by lenders in a large number of US cities beginning in 1999. Participants were given a credit to qualifying income that allowed them to borrow more for homes in neighborhoods with good transit access and high population density. We use the term “transportation-credit mortgage” (TCM) to refer to both programs. The TCM was intended to reduce auto use, decrease sprawl, and increase low- and moderate-income homeownership. But there was little demand. Only about 300 loans were made, and both programs had been discontinued by 2008. Some advocate the TCMs revival. Would this be a good idea? We draw upon interviews with lenders, Fannie Mae officials, and transit agencies; lending data from Fannie Mae; and relevant academic research and theory. The TCM likely generated little market interest because of implementation problems and competitive terms from other loan products. But even if the TCM could be revived, with its implementation problems resolved, it would still be unlikely to meet the intended social goals in most markets. The TCM could even make low- and moderate-income households worse off. More radical changes, and more research, are needed.