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PUBLICATION
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 MTI Report 01-19
Land Use and Transportation Alternatives: Constraint or Expansion of
Household Choice?
Transportation and land use research that
considers such alternatives as New Urbanist development, jobs-housing balance,
transit villages, or “smart growth” most typically tests the capacity of
such physical forms to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) or bring about
other desired outcomes in the modification of travel behavior. Establishing
such causality is broadly seen as a precondition for the urban planning
interventions that are presumed to be necessary to bring these forms about. But such
a view neglects the extent to which current interventions—notably zoning and
transportation regulations—tend to preclude the development of such innovations
in areas of high accessibility where they can potentially be of
the greatest benefit.
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ABSTRACT
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Transportation and land use research that
considers such alternatives as New Urbanist development, jobs-housing
balance, transit villages, or “smart growth” most typically tests the
capacity of such physical forms to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) or
bring about other desired outcomes in the
modification of travel behavior. Establishing such causality is broadly
seen as a precondition for the urban planning interventions that are
presumed to be necessary to bring these forms about. But such a view
neglects the extent to which current interventions—notably zoning and
transportation regulations—tend to preclude the development of such
innovations in areas of high accessibility where they can
potentially be of the greatest benefit.
Payoffs in VMT reduction, though desirable, are
hardly the necessary precondition for the relaxation of such regulations.
Instead, the increased land use and transportation choice
that such liberalization can engender is self-justifying in that it
allows households to forge a closer link between their land use and
transportation preferences on the one hand and their actual choices on
the other. This framework is examined here through a
comparison of two metropolitan areas: Boston, which offers its residents
relatively rich opportunities for residence in transit and
pedestrian friendly areas, and Atlanta, which offers many fewer such
opportunities. The study is based on three principal components: A
clustering of neighborhoods throughout each metropolitan area according
to their transit and pedestrian characteristics; an
urban design analysis of selected neighborhoods in each region; and a
survey of 1600 households regarding their preferences for neighborhood
environments. The study concludes that while residents of Atlanta are
considerably less interested in transit- and pedestrian
friendly neighborhoods than their Boston counterparts, the difference in
preference is insufficient to explain the difference in the
transit- and pedestrian quality of the neighborhoods the two groups
inhabit. The neighborhood choices of the Boston residents was, as a
consequence, considerably more sensitive to their transportation and land
use preferences than the choices of their Atlanta counterparts.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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 Jonathan Levine, Ph.D. is Associate Professor
and Coordinator of Doctoral
Studies, Urban and Regional Planning Program,
A. Alfred Taubman
College of Architecture and Urban Planning,
University of Michigan.
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TECHNICAL
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MTI Report 01-19
Land Use and Transportation Alternatives: Constraint or Expansion of Household Choice?
Principal Investigator: Dr. Jonathan Levine
Published:
June 2002
Key Words: Transportation, Land use, New urbanism, Residential choice
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