Suburban Transformations: From Employment Centers to Mixed-Use Activity Centers

This working paper probes the phenomenon of employment center transformations. Because the process is still unfolding, very much still in a developmental stage, combined with data limitations, our original research focus had to be revised. Compared to the study of the effects of built environment on the travel of residents, there has been relatively little empirical research on how the design of employment centers impacts how workers travel. This is despite the fact that past research has suggested that design attributes of the destination-end of a trip has as much impact on travel choices as the residential-end of home-based trips (Cervero, 2002). Part of the reason for this slant is the fact that most regional travel surveys that inform these studies compile data on households and their members’ travel patterns. Even the census journey-to-work data focus on residential travel and although it is possible to identify the non-home-end of work trips, the fairly small sample of travel choices limits the number of data observations assigned to any particular work destination. Accordingly, researchers interested in studying how design influences employee travel are dependent on the few specialized surveys focused on employment centers. Such surveys were more plentiful in the 1980s on the wake of trip-reduction ordinances that mandated employee surveys (Ferguson, 2001; Cervero and Geisenbeck, 1988) however in more recent times such specialized surveys have all but disappeared. The city of Pleasanton, California, for instance, required that employee surveys be conducted starting in the mid-1980s as part of its trip reduction ordinance but opted to eliminate this requirement by the late 1990s. Even regional ridesharing agencies have gotten out of the employee-survey business. RIDES for Bay Area Commuters, for instance, organized and conducted surveys of large employers from 1992 to 2002 (though admittedly samples were of insufficient size to draw inferences for any one center); after the organization was disbanded and these functions were taken over by 511.org in the mid-2000s, annual employee surveys were discontinued. While the original aim of this research was to link changing employment center designs to changes in travel behavior, the absence of sufficient data to support such an investigation required a shift in focus. Accordingly, the work presented in this paper is more inductive in nature, relying on trend data (1990 to 2000) and several case studies to generate insights into the process and scope of employment center transformations. Like all qualitative, inductive research, our aim is not so much to test hypotheses as it is to probe and investigate changes in the make-up and design of suburban job centers with an eye toward building a stronger conceptual framework for studying this phenomenon – one that hopefully will aid in one-day formulating clear hypotheses and empirically testing the influences of shifting designs on workers’ travel behaviors. In so doing, we hope to help lay a foundation that will hypo-deductive, empirical studies to be carried out in coming years.