Comprehensive Analysis of Built Environment Characteristics on Household Residential Choice and Automobile Ownership Levels

This research paper identifies the research designs and methodologies that may be used to test the presence of “true” causality versus residential sorting-based “spurious” associations in the land-use transportation connection. The paper then develops a methodological formulation to control for residential sorting effects in the analysis of the effect of built environment attributes on travel behavior-related choices. The formulation is applied to comprehensively examine the impact of the built environment, transportation network attributes, and demographic characteristics on residential choice and car ownership decisions. The model formulation takes the form of a joint mixed multinomial logit-ordered response structure that accommodates differential sensitivity to the built environment and transportation network variables due to both demographic and unobserved household attributes and controls for the self-selection of individuals into neighborhoods based on car ownership preferences stemming from both demographic characteristics and unobserved household factors. The analysis in the paper represents, to our knowledge, the first instance of the formulation and application of a unified mixed multinomial logit-ordered response structure in the econometric literature. The empirical analysis in the paper is based on the residential choice and car ownership decisions of San Francisco Bay area residents.