LAND USE AND TRANSPORT INTERACTION Ayu Andani

Paper Review

Cao, X.J., Xu, Z. and Fan, Y., 2010. Exploring the connections among residential location, self-selection,
and driving: Propensity score matching with multiple treatments. Transportation research part A:
policy and practice, 44(10), pp.797-805.

This research explores the relation between residential location and self-selection to travel behaviour by
using propensity score matching. Here they put the skin colour as one of the explanatory variables, but
unfortunately, they did not explain on how this variable affect the model. A study by Eluru et al. (2008)
concludes that White households more likely to move than non-White households. Other important that
should be considered in residential location is housing market condition, such as housing price (Kortum
et al., 2012, Kim et al., 2005). Instead of using number of adults as the exogenous variable, its better to
take number of dependent children into account, since this significantly affect the preference to drive a
car (Commins and Nolan, 2011, O'Fallon et al., 2004). Moreover, they did not describe the number of
respondents in each type of residential locations and whether or not they put weight in the sample. The
differentiation of location types into urban areas, inner-ring suburbs, suburbs, and exurbs, based on
simply distance, is ambiguous and questionable. The distance range between each location is quite short
and this potentially could create a spatial correlation, that is when observations at nearby locations tend
to have similar characteristics (Hong et al., 2014). Urban areas are distinguished by their spatial (and/or
non-spatial) characteristics, such as the population density, transportation network, number of activities,
etc. The area of those neighbourhoods are hardly defined by fixed metric calculation and the growth of
these neighbourhoods is also dynamic and keep evolving due to the various factors. This study is also
not considered all of the built environment aspects that proposed by (Ewing and Cervero, 2010), which
are density, design, destination accessibility, land-use diversity, and distance to transit. However, in
general, this study gave an insight about how built environment or personal attitudes solely affect the
driving behaviour. It is substantial to determine land-use and transport policy in a certain type of
neighbourhoods.

References:

COMMINS, N. & NOLAN, A. 2011. The determinants of mode of transport to work in the Greater Dublin
Area. Transport Policy, 18, 259-268.
ELURU, N., PINJARI, A., GUO, J., SENER, I., SRINIVASAN, S., COPPERMAN, R. & BHAT, C. 2008.
Population updating system structures and models embedded in the comprehensive
econometric microsimulator for urban systems. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the
Transportation Research Board, 171-182.
EWING, R. & CERVERO, R. 2010. Travel and the Built Environment. Journal of the American Planning
Association, 76, 265-294.
HONG, J., SHEN, Q. & ZHANG, L. 2014. How do built-environment factors affect travel behavior? A
spatial analysis at different geographic scales. Transportation, 41, 419-440.
KIM, J. H., PAGLIARA, F. & PRESTON, J. 2005. The intention to move and residential location choice
behaviour. Urban Studies, 42, 1621-1636.
KORTUM, K., PALETI, R., BHAT, C. & PENDYALA, R. 2012. Joint model of residential relocation choice
and underlying causal factors. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research
Board, 28-37.
O'FALLON, C., SULLIVAN, C. & HENSHER, D. A. 2004. Constraints affecting mode choices by morning
car commuters. Transport Policy, 11, 17-29.