Residential Location Preferences: New Perspective

The objective of this paper is to explore residential location and how they relate to travel behavior. The literature focuses on preferences in relation to physical and demographic aspects, such as land uses, facilities, transportation facilities, transportation services, car ownership, income, household size and travel accessibility. However, this study also addresses social and cultural issues such as racial diversity. The case study reported here is based on Iskandar Malaysia development region. Reliability Analysis, Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modelling are applied to determine the significance factors and the relationship which have been tested to 384 respondents. The results identify that religious factors are influential in terms of residential location preferences. These findings add a different perspective on travel behavior studies, which are heavily dominated by research from Western Europe, North America and Australasia. It is suggested that transport researchers need reject universal conclusions and be clearer about the contexts in which their findings most apply.