A Broader Context for Land Use and Travel Behavior, and a Research Agenda

Problem: Planning studies of land use and travel behavior focus on regression analysis of travel as a function of traveler demographics and land use near study subjects’ residences. Methodological debates have tended to focus almost exclusively on the possibility that persons choose their residence based on how they wish to travel. This longer view steps back from the confines of the regression-based literature to explain the historical roots, methods, and results of the literature, and to assess how the land use–travel literature must be transformed to be more relevant to planning. Purpose: There are many summaries and meta-analyses of the impact of land use on travel. The goal here is not to understand how we might better specify a regression or summarize the results of past studies, but rather to explain how a literature that has become fundamental to planning scholarship is failing to be sufficiently planning focused. At the same time, this longer view describes how the literature can be transformed to address the planning challenges of today and tomorrow. Methods: This longer view summarizes over 100 articles, covering transportation methods from the dawn of the interstate highway era to topics that include program evaluation, land development, and cognitive aspects of travel behavior. The primary focus is on the land use and travel literature, but the review and analysis is broad ranging and places the literature and its challenges within the broader context of recent developments in the social sciences, planning, policy, and electronic data collection. Results and conclusions: This longer view elucidates three research frontiers that will be necessary to move the land use–travel literature forward. First, behavioral models of land use and travel must expand to consider how land is developed, how places are planned, and how cities are built. Second, the land use–travel literature should build a robust retrospective program evaluation tradition, which is currently almost completely absent in a scholarly field dominated by cross-sectional hypothesis tests and forecasting models. Third, economic social welfare analysis must be carefully researched, including questions of preferences for neighborhood types and whether such preferences are fixed or malleable. Takeaway for practice: Planning is about city building, and the literature and practice on land use and travel behavior should adapt to better support city building. This requires both a serious commitment to social science research and planning's characteristically broad view of context, problem, and place. In an era of climate change, and amidst debates about sustainability, the land use–travel literature must more aggressively examine the process of plans and place making, evaluate the increasingly innovative transportation policies being implemented at the local level, and develop methods that allow more informed discussion about the costs and benefits of transportation policies. Research support: None.