Randall Crane

THE INFLUENCE OF URBAN FORM ON TRAVEL: AN INTERPRETIVE REVIEW

Can neighborhood design improve traffic? Although a fair question in its own right, several influential planning strategies, including “the new urbanism,”“smart growth,” and the “livability agenda” take the answer more or less for granted. But what do we really know, and how can we improve our knowledge on this key issue? The article first proposes a scheme for categorizing research addressing these and related questions. It then presents a detailed discussion of key studies of urban form and travel behavior. The research strategies employed and the data, methods, and results of these studies are evaluated in detail. The article concludes that although this body of research is improving in several respects and should be encouraged by policy makers and scholars alike, our current understanding of this complex group of relationships remains tentative. The basis for using land use and urban design to selectively change travel behavior thus appears limited in the near term, whereas research opportunities abound.

Does neighborhood design influence travel?: A behavioral analysis of travel diary and GIS data

Can urban design improve the environment? If communities could be designed to reduce automobile use, then yes. But can urban design influence travel? Surprisingly perhaps, the effects of any specific neighborhood feature on travel behavior at the margin are all but unknown. The policy significance of this issue is reflected in the swelling popularity of the “new urbanism” and other planning strategies employing land use tools to mitigate the environmental impacts of metropolitan development. In addition to asserting that development patterns and densities affect how far, how often, and by what means people travel, urban designers frequently argue that the legibility and shape of the local street pattern play a key role. “Connected” residential blocks are thus associated with less driving by comparison with the circuitous routes of the modern suburban cul-de-sac — chiefly by reducing trip lengths and facilitating pedestrian and transit access. Remarkably, there is little empirical and theoretical support for these claims. This paper provides the first direct tests of these hypotheses within a consistent behavioral framework. An analysis of household travel diary and GIS data for San Diego finds little role for land use in explaining travel behavior, and no evidence that the street network pattern affects either short or long non-work travel decisions. While results may vary in other areas, the empirical argument for using land use as an element of regional air quality or other environmental plans remains to be demonstrated.

The influence of land use on travel behavior: specification and estimation strategies

While the relationship between urban form and travel behavior is a key element of many current planning initiatives aimed at reducing car travel, the literature faces two major problems. First, this relationship is extremely complex. Second, several specification and estimation issues are poorly addressed in prior work, possibly generating biased results. We argue that many of the latter problems are overcome by systematically isolating the separable influences of urban design characteristics on travel and then properly analyzing individual-level data. We further clarify which results directly follow from alternative land use arrangements and which may or may not, and thus identify the specific hypotheses to be tested against the data. We then develop more-reliable tests of these hypotheses, and explore the implications of alternative behavioral assumptions regarding travel costs. The measured influence of land use on travel behavior is shown to be very sensitive to the form of the empirical strategy.

Water markets, market reform and the urban poor: Results from Jakarta, Indonesia

Abstract Roughly 20% of the eight million persons in Jakarta receive water from municipal water connections to their homes. Remaining supplies are essentially private and include street vendors, standpipes, and wells—the last of these an inexpensive but increasingly contaminated source in many areas. An expansion of the network of in-house connections is in progress, but will take several decades to complete. In the interim, various strategies have been advanced to deal with persistent problems of access to good water by the poor. This study examines the impacts of one such plan put to action, the April 1990 deregulation measure permitting private homes with water connections to resell municipal water. We present preliminary evidence that the primary social benefits of deregulation are the money savings and increased consumption by former vendor and standpipe customers. In most respects the aggregate effect is equivalent to a costless expansion in the standpipe system, with the difference on the supply side that significant transfers from vendors and standpipe operators to household resellers may occur.

The Contribution of Environmental Amenities to Low-income Housing: A Comparative Study of Bangkok and Jakarta

Central and local governments and their creditors are increasingly interested in cost recovery for public services. These strategies have two aims: increasing revenues and making a better connection between benefits received and consumer bills. This paper estimates a hedonic model for household-level data in a rare contrast of slums in two Asian mega-cities to provide comparative information about how the poor value environmental amenities and basic infrastructure access. The results suggest that slum housing prices do reflect differentials in public service access and that rough estimates of the value of access can be cheaply and usefully obtained for planning purposes.

Sex changes everything: The recent narrowing and widening of travel differences by gender

The average U.S. male historically commutes further and longer than his female counterpart. Yet pivotal changes at home, as younger women especially increase their influence on household location and work decisions, and in the labor market, and as womens participation rates and profiles approach mens, strongly suggest that genders influence on travel might be changing as well. Furthermore, the independent and interactive influence of other demographic factors, not least age and race, remain unclear. This study analyzes national microdata covering the past 20 years to examine both issues. We find sources of both convergence and divergence in travel behaviors by sex. The gender gap in commute length of older workers is growing, even while that of younger workers steadily closes. At the same time, racial differences in mode choice and commute times are becoming less pronounced—both by race and by gender. Thus, gendered elements of travel demand are indeed evolving, if not in predictable directions.

Measuring Access to Basic Services in Global Cities: Descriptive and Behavioral Approaches

Abstract There is little comparative research on access to basic services by the urban poor of the developing world. Rarer still are consistent definitions of “access,” an indicator traditionally used to simultaneously reflect costs as well as consumption. The policy fallout is that the status quo is both obscure and inconsistently measured. In practice, neither evaluation nor improvement of access is straightforward. Our study proposes a new taxonomy of infrastructure access indicators, demonstrating how the costs and benefits of service availability and use correspond to the range of conventional indices. Consistent distinctions are made between descriptive and behavioral measures, supply and demand factors, and community and household detail. These measures provide complementary data on a range of policy needs. We apply them to original survey data from Bangkok and Jakarta to explore the adequacy of urban services.

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

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.

Price specification and the demand for public goods

Abstract Nearly all public expenditure demand studies define the marginal price for publicly provided goods as the households share of the local property tax burden, or what is often called the tax- price. Such a definition is at odds with two familiar facts: taxes are ordinarily distortionary, and property values are often influenced by the value of local services. This paper constructs a theoretically consistent marginal tax-price measure incorporating these considerations. The new measure demonstrates that previous estimates of the price and income elasticities of demand for public services are biased, except under very restrictive circumstances. Moreover, the direction of this bias will depend upon the actual incidence of public spending and the tenure status of residents.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Planning for Climate Change: Assessing Progress and Challenges

Problem: The planet appears to be warming in a complex, highly unpredictable, unplanned-for pattern. Purpose: We briefly describe the seven articles and survey the topic of this special issue, framing it using both climate science and policy analysis. Methods: We review definitions and discuss known explanations and planning strategies. Results and conclusions: Planning for climate change differs from traditional urban planning in that we lack knowledge and experience about the efficacy of particular responses and that, without collective efforts, responses by individual municipalities, states, and even countries are likely to be ineffective. This combination of uncertainty and interdependency makes climate change a wicked problem. Takeaway for practice: Planners are relatively uninformed about whether and how particular climate change mitigation and adaptation responses are likely to work. Given this, we argue that planners’ experiences in dealing with uncertainty and contingent and collective actions positions them well to formulate and implement effective climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. Research support: None.