Impact of Metropolitan-level Built Environment on Travel Behavior

Abstract There has been a growing recognition about the significant impact of land use pattern on travel behavior and changes in built environment pattern could potentially be considered as a long-term solution to change people's travel behavior and especially vehicle miles traveled (VMT). However, the existing literature has been mainly focused on local and neighborhood characteristics of the built environment and little is known about the unique or relative influence of the metropolitan-level built environment. In this empirical analysis we use an extensive database for six major metropolitan areas in the U.S to employ multilevel mixed effect model highlighting the impact of built environment characteristics on travel behavior at different scales. Our findings show that changes in built environment measures not only at local and neighborhood levels but also at larger metropolitan/ regional levels could be very influential in changing people's travel behavior. Specifically, promoting compact, mixed-use built environment with well-connected street network can help to reduce VMT and thus provide better solutions to transportation-related issues