Does the Vehicle-Miles Traveled Associated with Location Efficiency Vary by Income Group?
The effect of the built environment on automobile travel is a focus of political jurisdictions, such as California, whose climate change policies emphasize land use planning as a strategy for reducing vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). Such policies, combined with growing market demand, have led to increased development in location-efficient neighborhoods, where high accessibility to jobs and services enable residents to drive less. This development is typically focused on higher-income populations; however many of these neighborhoods are historically home to lower-income populations. This raises the questions about the best use of the scarce, location-efficient space for achieving VMT reduction targets. Specifically, does location-efficient living reduce VMT more for some income groups than others? This research addresses this question by estimating a statistical model of VMT for the entire state of California by combining travel-survey, transit-service, and land-use data to estimate an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model of household VMT. This model quantifies the theoretical relationships between income, location efficiency, and VMT. The 2010-2012 California Household Travel Survey (CHTS) provides the core data set for the model estimation. The regression model finds no absolute differences in VMT reduction with location efficiency for the different income groups. This finding refutes calls for favoring higher-income households in location-efficient places on the rationale that these groups will reduce their driving more; conversely, this finding suggests that policy makers should allocate resources designed to increase location-efficient living based on other criteria, such as equity.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADA10 Standing Committee on Statewide Multimodal Transportation Planning.
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
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Authors:
- Newmark, Gregory L
- Haas, Peter M
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2016-1-10 to 2016-1-14
- Date: 2016
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 26p
- Monograph Title: TRB 95th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Households; Income; Land use; Location; Public transit; Regression analysis; Statistical analysis; Sustainable development; Travel surveys; Vehicle miles of travel
- Geographic Terms: California
- Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Transportation (General);
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01593555
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 16-4242
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Mar 15 2016 10:07AM