Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

The minimum circuity frontier and the journey to work

Contents:

Author Info

  • Levinson, David
  • El-Geneidy, Ahmed

Abstract

People travel between places of residence and work destinations via transportation networks. The relation between selection of home and work locations has been heavily debated in the transportation planning literature. In this paper we use circuity, the ratio of network to Euclidean distance, to better understand the choice of residential location relative to work. This is done using two methods of defining origins and destinations in twenty metropolitan regions in the United States, with more detailed analysis of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota and Portland, Oregon. The first method of selection is based on actual choice of residence and work locations. The second is based on a randomly selected dataset of origins and destinations in the same regions, followed by a comparison between the two methods for these regions. The study shows circuity measured through randomly selected origins and destinations differs from circuity measured from actual origins and destinations. Workers tend to reside in areas such that the journey to work circuity is lower than random, applying intelligence to their location decisions. Consistent with traditional urban economic theory, this suggests locators wish to locate on the frontier with the largest residential lot at the shortest commute time, but in contrast with the classic model which simplifies transportation networks to be uniform, we cannot assume that all possible home-work pairs are on the frontier. This finding, developed from microscopic data not previously used for this question, reveals an important issue related to residence choice and location theory and how resident workers tend to locate with respect to network configuration in an urban context.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V89-4WTHS2D-1/2/67040045da12061696e7b94928f07d06
Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Regional Science and Urban Economics.

Volume (Year): 39 (2009)
Issue (Month): 6 (November)
Pages: 732-738

as in new window
Handle: RePEc:eee:regeco:v:39:y:2009:i:6:p:732-738

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/regec

Related research

Keywords: Network structure Travel behavior Transport geography Commuting Circuity Directness;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Giuliano, Genevieve, 1991. "Is Jobs-Housing Balance a Transportation Issue?," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt4874r4hg, University of California Transportation Center.
  2. Small, Kenneth A. & Song, Shunfeng, 1992. ""Wasteful" Commuting: A Resolution," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt5142n2ts, University of California Transportation Center.
  3. Lothlorien Redmond & Patricia Mokhtarian, 2001. "The positive utility of the commute: modeling ideal commute time and relative desired commute amount," Transportation, Springer, vol. 28(2), pages 179-205, May.
  4. Small, Kenneth A & Song, Shunfeng, 1992. ""Wasteful" Commuting: A Resolution," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(4), pages 888-98, August.
  5. Robert F. Love & James G. Morris, 1979. "Mathematical Models of Road Travel Distances," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 25(2), pages 130-139, February.
  6. Cho, Eun Joo & Rodriguez, Daniel & Song, Yan, 2008. "The Role of Employment Subcenters in Residential Location Decisions," The Journal of Transport and Land Use, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, vol. 1(2), pages 121-151.
  7. Kim, Chansung, 2008. "Commuting time stability: A test of a co-location hypothesis," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 524-544, March.
  8. Jos Van Ommeren, 2004. "The commuting distribution," ERSA conference papers ersa04p214, European Regional Science Association.
  9. Samaniego, Horacio & Moses, Melanie E., 2008. "Cities as Organisms: Allometric Scaling of Urban Road Networks," The Journal of Transport and Land Use, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, vol. 1(1), pages 21-39.
  10. Wachs, Martin & Taylor, Brian D. & Levine, Ned & Ong, Paul, 1993. "The Changing Commute: A Case Study of the Jobs/Housing Relationship over Time," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt7424635r, University of California Transportation Center.
  11. Clark, William A. V. & Huang, Youqin & Withers, Suzanne, 2003. "Does commuting distance matter?: Commuting tolerance and residential change," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 199-221, March.
  12. Ballou, Ronald H. & Rahardja, Handoko & Sakai, Noriaki, 2002. "Selected country circuity factors for road travel distance estimation," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 36(9), pages 843-848, November.
  13. Giuliano, Genevieve & Small, Kenneth A., 1993. "Is the Journey to Work Explained by Urban Structure?," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt2ss7x5b1, University of California Transportation Center.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Daniel Arribas-Bel & Charles R. Schmidt, 2011. "Self-Organizing Maps and the US Urban Spatial Structure," GeoDa Center Working Papers 1049, GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation.
  2. Elif Alkay, 2011. "In Depth Analysis of the Home to Work Travel Pattern in the Istanbul Metropolitan Area," ERSA conference papers ersa11p371, European Regional Science Association.
  3. David Levinson, 2011. "Network Structure and City Size," Working Papers 000094, University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:regeco:v:39:y:2009:i:6:p:732-738

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wendy Shamier).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.