The Effect of Urban Form on Residential Relocation and Non-work Travel Patterns: A Case of Florida Households

The authors investigate the impact of polycentric urban form and decentralized employment on residential location decisions and non-work motor vehicle travel. The authors first present empirically testable models of the interaction between urban form and motor vehicle travel demand drawn from urban economic theory. Then travel behavior responses are modeled at the household level using a dataset that combines tour-based activity-travel data with land-use measures at the United States Census block group level. The travel behavior data comes from a sample of 15,884 households from the Florida add-on version of the 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), as provided by the Florida Department of Transportation System Planning Office. Using geographic information system mapping software, the authors merge the NHTS data with parcel-level housing data to estimate accessibility measures. Preliminary findings provide evidence linking measures of polycentric urban form to changes in home-work commuter patterns and changes in non-work motor vehicle travel. The authors observe that residency status positively affects residential location choices, as indicated by selected residency tenure variables. Households residing in the State for less than two years have a 10-percent longer home-work commuting pattern. These households tend to have a more disperse activity space (a realization of the time-space prism), resulting in increased miles traveled and longer home-work distance. The combined effect of relocation patterns on the demand of travel results in an increase of about 21 percent in daily tour-level vehicle miles of travel and an increase of about 5.7 percent in the size of the activity space. These results provide evidence to support policies that would reduce the spatial allocation of activities and improve connectivity to other modes of transport at and around subcenters.