Travel plans for new developments: a global review

A travel plan is a mechanism for delivering a package of transport measures at a site to manage car use and encourage the use of more sustainable forms of transport. In recent years, travel plans have been required for new infill and greenfield developments through the land-use planning and approvals process, predominantly in the United Kingdom, the United States, continental Europe and Australia. This paper contributes to the literature by providing a global review of travel plans for new developments. The results show that while travel plans for new developments share a common set of elements with those for pre-existing sites, differences within each element are notable, particularly in the types of travel plan measures adopted, processes for managing the travel plan, and approaches to monitoring and review. Results of previous evaluations have varied considerably, although most have reported a reduction in car driver trips of 10–20 percentage points. Despite this, most evaluations lack rigour, with a paucity of robust evidence. Key success factors identified by the literature, such as the provision of an explicit policy supporting the role of travel plans, should be embedded within the travel planning process where possible to ensure best outcomes for new developments.     

A review of the evidence for induced travel and changes in transportation and environmental policy in the US and the UK

This paper reviews recent research into the demand inducing effects of new transportation capacity. We begin with a discussion of the basic theoretical background and then review recent research both in the UK and the US. Results of this research show strong evidence that new transportation capacity induces increased travel, both due to short run effects and long run changes in land use development patterns. While this topic has long been debated amongst transportation planners, the fundamental hypothesis and theory has long been apparent in studies of transportation economics and planning that evaluated different issues (e.g. travel time budgets and urban economic development effects). We summarize much of this work and relate the theoretical issues to recent empirical research. We then proceed to examine recent changes in transportation and environmental policy in the US and the UK. The role of the new knowledge of induced travel effects would be expected to lead to changes in the conduct of transportation and environmental policy. Changes in policy and implementation of those policies are still occurring and we provide some suggestions on how to move forward in these areas.     

The built environment and travel behavior in urban China: A literature review

Interests in studying of the built environment impacts on travel behavior have proliferated from North America to other parts of the world including China. Until very recently, there has been very little research into travel behavior in China. However, during the last decade, there has been a fast growing interest in studying the built environment and travel behavior in Chinese cities, perhaps motivated by China’s unprecedented urbanization and rapid urban transport development. Case studies from China provide new insights into the impacts of built environment on travel behavior that can help to enrich existing scholarship. However, currently there is a generally poor understanding of the role played by Chinese research and how it has enriched the international literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by reviewing studies in and outside China by both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars. The focus is on the contribution of these studies to the international literature. We identify four areas of contribution: how the built environment has been developed and its implications for travel behavior; the importance of housing sources in defining residential built environment and explaining travel behavior; the unique Danwei (or work unit) perspective on jobs-housing relationships and commuting behavior; and the importance of neighborhood types in explaining travel behavior in Chinese cities. The findings from this review should be relevant for researchers interested in developing future studies that will further advance geographic knowledge of the built environment and travel behavior, specifically in China and with broader global contexts.     

Sustainable Transport in the European Union: A Review of the Past Research and Future Ideas

Abstract

This paper presents a review of the research on the sustainability of transport systems carried out over the last 15 years for the European Union (EU), identifies some missing gaps and elaborates on the prospective future ideas. The general concept of sustainable development and definitions of sustainability of transport systems and their operationalization are discussed. These are followed by the general review of the research on the sustainable transport systems funded by the EU 4th, 5th and 6th Framework Programs. Consequently, refinement of existing and/or developing an innovative system for monitoring sustainability of transport systems in the EU based on the indicator system(s) of performances is suggested as a prospective research idea.     

A review of the impact of parking policy measures on travel demand

This paper reviews the empirical evidence relating to the impact of parking policy measures on the demand for parking and for travel. Disaggregate modal choice models, disaggregate parking location models and site‐specific studies of parking behaviour are examined. With regard to modal choice models, it is concluded that few studies deal adequately with parking factors, but that there is some support for the view that parking policy measures are a relatively important influence on modal choice. When parking location models are examined parking policy variables are shown to have a substantial impact on choice of parking location. With regard to site‐specific studies, the paper concludes that there is a great variation in the parking price elasticities quoted, which reflects partly the methodological problems associated with such studies. Suggestions to improve model specification are made.     

Activity settings and travel behaviour: A social contact perspective

Using time-use data from Canada, Norway, and Sweden, this study briefly outlines the essence of the activity setting approach and illustrates one aspect of its usefulness by exploring the impact of social contact on travel behaviour. The activity system approach views behaviour in context. Activity settings are generic components of the activity system and studying them using time-use diaries can provide major insights into travel behaviour. Focusing on social contact, this paper characterizes the social environment in terms of social circle (interaction partners) and social space (location). The analysis shows that there are clear differences in the levels of social interaction across various groups, including those who work at home. The 1992 Canadian data showed people working at the workplace spend relatively more time with others, about 50% of total time awake. Working at home reduced the time with others to a low of 15.7%. when people worked at home the family benefited, almost doubling the time spent with them compared to those working at the workplace. Persons working at home only spend the most time alone. There is a tendency for persons with low social interaction to travel more. It is argued that individual need, or want, social contact and if they cannot find it at the workplace they will seek it elsewhere thus generating travel. Whether this is the result of need or opportunity is of minor relevance, what it does suggest is that working in isolation at home will not necessarily diminish travel but rather may simply change its purpose. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Sociological perspectives on travel and mobilities: A review

There is increasing interest in understanding and achieving changes in travel behaviour, but a focus on individual behaviour change may overlook the potential for achieving change via transformation at the levels of institutions, cultures and societies – the domains of sociological inquiry. In this paper, we review sociological contributions to the literature on travel and ‘mobilities’. We summarise four key themes which supplement or contradict arguments made in mainstream transport debates on behaviour change. The first involves focusing on travel ‘practices’ as social entities with dynamics of their own, rather than on individual behaviours. The second relates to the changing natures of societies, and the implications for travel. The third explores and interprets the issue of car dependence in ways which highlight the ethical, experiential and emotional dimensions associated with car use, its symbolic role in societies increasingly concerned with consumption, and its differing roles within different cultures. Finally, the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ highlights issues such as the increasing links between travel and new technologies, and the primacy of social networks in influencing travel decisions. These themes emphasise the importance of understanding the broader contexts in which travel choices are made. In particular, the implication is that the creation of more sustainable travel patterns will require changes at a range of social levels, not simply in individual behaviours, and that changes to transport will inevitably be linked with, and influenced by, broader changes in the values and practices developed by societies as a whole.     

Built environment and mode choice relationship for commute travel in the city of Rajkot,India

Metropolitan areas around the world are looking for sustainable strategies to reduce use of private automobiles, energy consumption and emissions, often achieved by built environment interventions that encourage use of sustainable modes of transport. This study contributes by providing the empirical evidence on the relation between built environment and mode choice in context of Indian city of Rajkot. Using personal interview data and data available from Rajkot Municipal Corporation it is observed that there is a strong tendency among Rajkot residents to preselect their residential location to suit their modal preferences. This is especially true for non-motorized transport users. Among the built environment variables, access to destination and land use related indicators also have significant influence on mode choice. The study Infers that the land use policy should focus on accessibility and mixing of diverse uses, and transport supply will have to be location based to support non-motorized and public transport travel.     

Impacts of automated vehicles on travel behaviour and land use: an international review of modelling studies

ABSTRACT

Automated vehicles (AVs) could completely change mobility in the coming years and decades. As AVs are still under development and gathering empirical data for further analysis is not yet possible, existing studies mainly applied models and simulations to assess their impact. This paper provides a comprehensive review of modelling studies investigating the impacts of AVs on travel behaviour and land use. It shows that AVs are mostly found to increase vehicle miles travelled and reduce public transport and slow modes share. This particularly applies to private AVs, which are also leading to a more dispersed urban growth pattern. Shared automated vehicle fleets, conversely, could have positive impacts, including reducing the overall number of vehicles and parking spaces. Moreover, if it is assumed that automation would make the public transport system more efficient, AVs could lead to a favouring of urbanisation processes. However, results are very sensitive to model assumptions which are still very uncertain (e.g. the perception of time in AVs) and more research to gain further insight should have priority in future research as well as the development of the models and their further adaptation to AVs.     

Bicycle parking: a systematic review of scientific literature on parking behaviour,parking preferences,and their influence on cycling and travel behaviour

ABSTRACT

Cycling is experiencing a revival in many cities. Research has focused on the determinants of cycling – in particular the role of the built environment and road infrastructure. Bicycle parking has received little attention – even though bicycles are parked most of the time. This article reviews the scientific literature on bicycle parking and identifies existing gaps in research and knowledge. The review analyses 94 peer-reviewed papers identified through a search in Scopus and Web of Science, in December 2017. The annual number of papers increased 15-fold between 1995 and 2017. Overall, the level of evidence on the importance of bicycle parking is limited. The majority of studies are based on cross-sectional data with the presence of parking as a binary independent variable. Most studies focus on bicycle parking at public transport stops and at work places. Few studies report on bicycle parking throughout cities, and hardly any on parking at residential locations. Bicycle parking supply and quality appears to be a determinant of cycling for current and potential cyclists. Our findings can serve as input for an evidence-based debate on the role of bicycle parking. For practitioners, our research supports investment in bicycle parking, but acknowledges that a proper evaluation of such initiatives needs to be conducted to increase the level of evidence.     

Value of travel time reliability: A review of current evidence

Travel time reliability is a fundamental factor in travel behavior. It represents the temporal uncertainty experienced by travelers in their movement between any two nodes in a network. The importance of the time reliability depends on the penalties incurred by the travelers. In road networks, travelers consider the existence of a trip travel time uncertainty in different choice situations (departure time, route, mode, and others). In this paper, a systematic review of the current state of research in travel time reliability, and more explicitly in the value of travel time reliability is presented. Moreover, a meta-analysis is performed in order to determine the reasons behind the discrepancy among the reliability estimates.     

Transport and equity in Latin America: a critical review of socially oriented accessibility assessments*

ABSTRACT

A growing concern for mobility-related social inclusion and equity is evident from both academic research and planning best practices. Scholarly research promotes accessibility as the main aim of transport planning, assuming it as the evaluative approach that better conveys how mobility contributes to individuals' well-being and participation in social life. Accessibility can be crucial to address the socio-spatial inequalities that characterise manifold settings across the world. Amongst them, Latin American countries have been keen in tackling such imbalances through mobility-related interventions, as the renowned cases of Curitiba, Medellin and Bogotá show. The widespread interest in mobility as both a cause and effect of social disparities has generated an increasing stream of work that examines Latin American settings through the lenses of accessibility. This paper aims at critically reviewing the growing scholarly works that, providing accessibility-based evaluations, has examined issues of transport and equity in Latin America. Proposing a novel conceptual framework that considers the underlying ethical stance, components of accessibility and implications for planning and policy, this work examines what approaches, features and indicators are present in the current literature, as well as what settings have been taken into consideration by scholarly research. Moreover, the review has an explicit operational interest, to define what indicators are relevant or missing to assess accessibility in the light of social concerns, as well as to consider the current and potential implications that such research findings have on transport planning and policy. The review highlights how a growing but still limited body of work has examined transport and equity in Latin America, suggesting academic, technical and operational avenues to enhance theoretical and practical approaches to the issue.     

Deconstructing development density: Quality, quantity and price effects on household non-work travel

Smart growth and transit-oriented development proponents advocate increasing the density of new land development and infill redevelopment. This is partly in order to reduce auto use, by reducing distances between trip origins and destinations, creating a more enjoyable walking environment, slowing down road travel, and increasing the market for transit. But research investigating how development density influences household travel has typically been inadequate to account for this complex set of hypotheses: it has used theoretically unjustified measures, has not accounted for spatial scale very well, and has not investigated potentially important combinations of measures. Using data from a survey of metropolitan households in California, measures of development density corresponding to the main hypotheses about how density affects travel—activity density affecting distance traveled, network load density affecting the speed of auto travel, and built form density affecting the quality of walking—are tested as independent variables in models of auto trip speed and individual non-work travel. Residential network load density is highly negatively correlated with the speed of driving, and is also highly correlated with non-work travel, both singly and in combination with other measures. Activity density and built form density are not as significantly related, on their own. These results suggest that denser development will not influence travel very much unless road level-of-service standards and parking requirements are reduced or eliminated.     

A regression on climate policy: The European Commission’s legislation to reduce CO2 emissions from automobiles

As part of its efforts to reach the targets of the Kyoto Protocol, in April 2009 the European Commission enacted new legislation to reduce the per-kilometer CO₂ emissions of newly registered automobiles. This paper critically assesses this legislation with respect to its economic and technological underpinnings. First, we argue that the reliance on targets based on per-kilometer emissions not only conceals the true cost of compliance and thereby stifles informed public discourse, but is also less cost-effective than alternative measures such as emissions trading. Second, the emission targets stipulated in this legislation are based on linear-regression methods that we demonstrate to be poorly justified and misleading. Using instead stochastic-frontier analysis, which is argued to more accurately reflect the industry’s technological status quo, alternative targets are consequently proposed.     

The socio-economics of travel behavior and environmental burdens: A Detroit,Michigan regional context

The transportation industry—particularly light-duty vehicles—is a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses, accounting for about one-third of overall emissions in the U.S. Research to date has studied various factors that impact travel behavior of residents with varying socio-economic characteristics. However, research on the socio-economic characteristics of residents and their impact on environmental burdens within a single urban region, as measured by fuel consumption and vehicular emissions, is recognized as under-represented in the U.S. planning and transportation literature. This study focuses on the Detroit region, Michigan, a unique case study due to the scale of suburbanization and urban decline, yet representative of many mid-western cities. The article explores how socio-economic characteristics impact travel patterns and environmental burdens within six Detroit region neighborhoods. Data on individual travel behavior and personal vehicle characteristics gathered from a mail survey enabled an analysis into how associated environmental burdens varied with socio-economic composition. The analysis explores contributions to environmental burdens between poorer urban and wealthier suburban populations.     

The role of residential self-selection in land use-travel research: a review of recent findings

ABSTRACT

Residential self-selection (RSS) is an important concern in the land use-travel research. Although many studies have addressed RSS during the past two decades, empirical results are inconsistent in terms of the existence, magnitude, and direction of self-selection bias. Moreover, recent studies substantiated other plausible associations within the theoretical framework of RSS, such as the endogeneity of travel attitudes. These further complicate the role of RSS in the land use-travel relationship. To improve understanding, this paper summarises recent progress in the RSS research, especially the studies published in the last decade. Specifically, we review three types of influences among the built environment, attitudes, and travel behaviour, and discuss unsolved problems within each type. We also discuss measurement issues of the built environment and attitudes in the RSS research. Because attitudes could be confounders, moderators, and mediators of the link between the built environment and travel behaviour, we recommend panel data with at least three waves of household travel surveys to address the complicated influences of attitudes. Future research needs to be more process-oriented to better understand the nature of RSS and its complex roles in the land use-travel research.     

Individual transport emissions and the built environment: A structural equation modelling approach

Increasing CO₂ emissions from the transport sector have raised substantial concerns among researchers and policy makers. This research examines the impact of the built environment on individual transport emissions through two mediate variables, vehicle usage and vehicle type choice, within a structural equation modelling (SEM) framework. We find that new-urbanism-type built environment characteristics, including high density, mixed land use, good connectivity, and easy access to public transport systems help reduce transport CO₂ emissions. Such mitigating effect is achieved largely through the reduced vehicle miles travelled (VMT) and is enhanced slightly by the more efficient vehicles owned by individuals living in denser and more diverse neighborhoods, all else being equal. Our research findings provide some new evidence that supports land use policies as an effective strategy to reduce transport CO₂ emissions.     

Efficiency of European Funds in the Accession Countries: The Case of Transport Infrastructure Investments in Latvia

ABSTRACT

A transport initiative, like any kind of public action, has an impact on the monetary cost, time cost, efficiency and comfort of the transportation of goods and people, in particular transport infrastructure investments. All such initiatives are subject to cost benefit analyses at the national and EU level to know whether the present value of total net benefits including environmental impacts exceeds their cost. However, several important policy issues remain unresolved in standard evaluation procedures. One issue is whether the so-called direct measurement of user benefit, which consists of quantifying changes in surplus of the users of the transport system, captures all welfare generated in the economy. Another issue is how the gains (or possibly losses) of a transport initiative are distributed among regions. The aim of this article is to perform a systematic and quantitative analysis of the socio-economic and spatial impacts of alternative transport investments by carrying out scenario simulations in order to improve the understanding of the impact of transportation policies on the short- and long-term spatial development in Latvia. The general result from the scenario simulations is that rail projects seem to be more effective in terms of promoting regional economic activity than road projects.     

Incorporating human-factors in car-following models: A review of recent developments and research needs

Over the past decades there has been a considerable development in the modeling of car-following (CF) behavior as a result of research undertaken by both traffic engineers and traffic psychologists. While traffic engineers seek to understand the behavior of a traffic stream, traffic psychologists seek to describe the human abilities and errors involved in the driving process. This paper provides a comprehensive review of these two research streams.It is necessary to consider human-factors in CF modeling for a more realistic representation of CF behavior in complex driving situations (for example, in traffic breakdowns, crash-prone situations, and adverse weather conditions) to improve traffic safety and to better understand widely-reported puzzling traffic flow phenomena, such as capacity drop, stop-and-go oscillations, and traffic hysteresis. While there are some excellent reviews of CF models available in the literature, none of these specifically focuses on the human factors in these models.This paper addresses this gap by reviewing the available literature with a specific focus on the latest advances in car-following models from both the engineering and human behavior points of view. In so doing, it analyses the benefits and limitations of various models and highlights future research needs in the area.     

Exploring the capacity of social media data for modelling travel behaviour: Opportunities and challenges

In the past few years, the social science literature has shown significance attention to extracting information from social media to track and analyse human movements. In this paper the transportation aspect of social media is investigated and reviewed. A detailed discussion is provided about how social media data from different sources can be used to indirectly and with minimal cost extract travel attributes such as trip purpose, mode of transport, activity duration and destination choice, as well as land use variables such as home, job and school location and socio-demographic attributes including gender, age and income. The evolution of the field of transport and travel behaviour around applications of social media over the last few years is studied. Further, this paper presents results of a qualitative survey from travel demand modelling experts around the world on applicability of social media data for modelling daily travel behaviour. The result of the survey reveals positive view of the experts about usefulness of such data sources.