Congestion and Accessibility: What's the Relationship?

This paper conceptually and empirically explores the complex relationship between congestion and accessibility. While congestion alters individual access to opportunities, its effects vary significantly across people, places, and time, variations that remain relatively understudied. This paper begins by proposing a conceptual framework with three components. First, congestion can constrain mobility and thus indirectly reduce accessibility. Second, congestion is associated with agglomerations of activity and with increased accessibility. Finally, congestion is in part a phenomenon of perception and behavior, cognitively altering an individual’s choice set of destinations and altering actual access to opportunities. Congestion and individual travel data for the Los Angeles region are used to explore the localized spatial relationship between congestion and accessibility. As the multifaceted framework suggests, congestion does not have a uniform effect on accessibility, but varies substantially by neighborhood. Some neighborhoods appear to be more “congestion adapted” than others by allowing high levels of activity participation despite high levels of congestion. To account for personal characteristics such as income that may influence the spatial analysis, this paper also constructs a model of the number of daily trips as a function of an array of personal and household characteristics. Residuals from the model suggest that place-based neighborhood effects explain the relatively higher levels of travel by residents found in the “congestion adapted” neighborhoods.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Mondschein, Andrew
  • Brumbaugh, Stephen
  • Taylor, Brian D
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2009-1-11 to 2009-1-15
• Date: 2009

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 88th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accessibility; Commuting; Mobility; Neighborhoods; Population density; Socioeconomic factors; Traffic congestion; Travel behavior; Travel patterns; Urban areas
• Geographic Terms: Los Angeles (California)
• Subject Areas: Economics; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Society; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01124540
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 09-0618
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Mar 23 2009 7:41AM