Land Use and Built Environment

Driven by fiscal constraints and disappointment with the performance of state-provided services, national and subnational governments have turned to the private sector for solutions in financing, constructing, and providing transportation services. Key concession package features and their effect on reaching closure in urban transportation agreements are analyzed. Case studies drawn from the major attempts to develop urban transportation infrastructures in Latin America through concession agreements are considered. Results indicate that features common to large infrastructure...

Much of the theoretical and empirical debate about transport and land-use planning has focused upon the strength and vitality of the connection between the two. Studies increasingly find that this connection is weakening and thus attempts to address urban transport problems with land-use policies are ineffective. The author introduces proximate commuting, a novel employer-based program that decreases urban commuting by providing marginal accessibility improvements to its participants. With the aid of a case study involving a commercial bank in the Western Detroit Metropolitan Area,...

By estimating multinomial choice models, this paper examines the relationship between travel mode choice and attributes of the local physical environment such as topography, sidewalk availability, residential density, and the presence of walking and cycling paths. Data for student and staff commuters to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill are used to illustrate the relationship between mode choice and the objectively measured environmental attributes, while accounting for typical modal characteristics such as travel time, access time, and out-of-pocket cost. Results...

Although new urbanism continues to gain popularity worldwide, many of its effects remain unexamined. If neighborhood design can support or impede active lifestyles, we hypothesize that residents of new urbanist neighborhoods will exhibit higher levels of physical activity than residents of conventional communities. Following a quasi-experimental research design, this study evaluates physical activity patterns of residents in two distinctly designed neighborhoods, a new urbanist and a conventional suburban neighborhood in a central North Carolina community. The two neighborhoods were...