The Effect of Residential Accessibility to Employment on Men's and Women's Travel

Abstract

This research explores the effect of residential gravity accessibility by automobile to all employment in the Atlanta metropolitan region on the quantity and nature of travel by men and women. The literature suggests that greater accessibility of residential locations is associated with more, but shorter trips, resulting in less travel. Using the Atlanta Regional Commission's 1990 Household Travel Survey, the author evaluated household and personal travel behavior and found: (1) individuals and households who live in more accessible portions of the metropolitan area spend significantly fewer minutes in travel; (2) among individuals this effect is seen primarily for employed men; (3) residential accessibility's effect on numbers of motorized trips is ambiguous and often insignificant, though students who were not employed and lived in more accessible locations made significantly fewer home-based school trips by motorized vehicle. These results demonstrate that residential accessibility does affect travel, reinforcing the belief that land use policy and physical planning to improve accessibility may provide means of manipulating travel demand to achieve higher quality of life, enhanced economic development and more efficient transportation. However, some planning policies aimed at least partly at increasing accessibility (zoning for higher densities, fostering mixed uses, achieving jobs-housing balance) can be costly, unpopular, or both. This research also demonstrates that residential accessibility's effects on travel, though significant, do not affect everyone, suggesting they may not be worth large sacrifices. Finally, though these effects are significant, and gravity measures of accessibility may help transportation planners predict the results of planned and unplanned changes when used with other information, they do not predict travel behavior well when used alone.

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