Land Use and Built Environment

Transit Service, Physical Agglomeration and Productivity in US Metropolitan Areas

Chatman, Daniel G.
Noland, Robert B.
2014

Public transit improvements could cause more clustered and higher-density employment and enable urban growth, giving rise to agglomeration economies by improving labour market accessibility, increasing information exchange and facilitating industrial specialisation. Using data on US metropolitan areas, this paper traces the links from transit service to central city employment density, urbanised area employment density and population; and from these physical agglomeration measures to average wages and per capita GMP. Significant indirect productivity effects of transit service are found....

Transit Access and the Agglomeration of New Firms : A Case Study of Portland and Dallas.

Noland, Robert B.
Chatman, Daniel G.
Klein, Nicholas J.
2014

The objective of this paper is to examine whether new firms are more likely to form near rail transit stations. Two relatively new light-rail systems—one in Portland, Oregon, and the other in Dallas, Texas—form the basis of the analysis. A geocoded, time-series database of firm births from 1991 through 2008 is analyzed using all firm births, firm births of various sizes, and firm births of specific industry sectors. A random effects, negative binomial model is used to examine associations between proximity to rail stations and other spatially defined variables. Results show that newly...

Psychological Economics, Travel Behavior, Residential Location Choice, and Sustainability: Possible New Rationales for Policy Intervention

Chatman, Dan
Broaddus, Andrea
2011

The sustainability policy agenda includes various land use, road pricing, and parking pricing policies that are intended to reduce the use and ownership of autos in order to lower carbon emissions, pollution and road congestion. Such well-established policy interventions are largely rooted in the microeconomic concepts of market failure and externalities. But recent research in psychological economics has identified a new kind of problem: people may make decisions that are not in their own self-interest, contrary to the underlying microeconomic assumption that people are “rational actors...

Methodology for Determining the Economic Development Impacts of Transit Projects

Chatman, Daniel
Noland, Robert
Tulach, Nicholas
Grady, Bryan
Ozbay, Kaan
Rognlien, Lars
Desautels, Andrew
Alexander, Lauren
Graham, Daniel
Bilton, Peter
Deka, Deva
Voorhoeve, Niels
Klein, Nick
Berechman, Joseph
2012

Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) project H-39, “Methodology for Determining the Economic Development Impacts of Transit Projects,” was aimed at developing a method for transit agencies to assess whether and under what circumstances transit investments have economic benefits that are in addition to land development stimulated by travel time savings. It addresses the productivity increases associated with agglomeration economies—economies of scale in density—that may be caused by transit improvements. The authors reviewed existing evaluation practices and academic research,...

How Will Smart Growth Land-use Policies Affect Travel? A Theoretical Discussion on the Importance of Residential Sorting

Cao, Xinyu
Chatman, Daniel
2016

Do policies to encourage compact, mixed use, pedestrian-friendly land-use patterns reduce driving? Not necessarily. Understanding how the built environment affects travel patterns is complex, not least because households may choose their neighborhoods on the basis of how they expect to get around. Some scholars have argued that ignoring this process of residential sorting, or ‘self-selection’, causes overestimates of built-environment influences and leads to false optimism about the efficacy of land-use policies in influencing travel. But others have suggested that residential self-...

Explaining the “Immigrant Effect” on Auto Use: The Influences of Neighborhoods and Preferences

Chatman, Daniel G.
2014

Since immigrants will account for most urban growth in the United States for the foreseeable future, better understanding their travel patterns is a critical task for transportation and land use planners. Immigrants initially travel in personal vehicles far less than the US-born, even when controlling for demographics, but their reliance on autos increases the longer they live in the US. Cultural or habitual differences, followed by assimilation to auto use, could partly explain this pattern; and it may also be partly due to changes in locations and characteristics of home and work...

Estimating the Effect of Land Use and Transportation Planning on Travel Patterns: Three Problems in Controlling for Residential Self-selection

Chatman, Daniel G.
2014

The common understanding of "residential self-selection" generally found in research on the effects of the built environment on travel is in error in three main ways. First, scholars have generally failed to recognize that the built environment may have different effects on travel for different households. Second, controlling for residential self-selection is not necessarily relevant to the predictive questions that controlled estimates are meant to inform. Third, in controlling for preferences and sorting, the literature has failed to account for the composition of the population and its...

Vision-Based Monitoring of Locally Linear Structures Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle1

Rathinam, Sivakumar
Kim, Zu Whan
Sengupta, Raja
2008

Inspecting and monitoring oil-gas pipelines, roads, rivers, and canals are very important in ensuring the reliability and life expectancy of these civil systems. An autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can decrease the operational costs, expedite the monitoring process, and be used in situations where a manned inspection is not possible. This paper addresses the problem of monitoring these systems using an autonomous UAV based on visual feedback. A single structure detection algorithm that can identify and localize various structures including highways, roads, and canals is presented...

Does Transit-Oriented Development Need the Transit?

Chatman, Daniel G.
2015

Urban planners have invested a lot of energy in the idea of transit-oriented developments (TODs). Developing dense housing near rail stations with mixed land uses and better walkability is intended to encourage people to walk, bike, and take transit instead of driving. But TODs can also be expensive, largely because rail itself is expensive. In one study, the average cost for light rail construction was $61 million per mile in 2009...

Does TOD Need the T?: On the Importance of Factors Other Than Rail Access

Chatman, Daniel G.
2013

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Transit-oriented developments (TODs) often consist of new housing near rail stations. Channeling urban growth into such developments is intended in part to reduce the climate change, pollution, and congestion caused by driving. But new housing might be expected to attract more affluent households that drive more, and rail access might have smaller effects on auto ownership and use than housing tenure and size, parking availability, and the neighborhood and subregional built environments. I surveyed households in northern New Jersey living within...