The relationship between urban form and travel behaviour: A micro-analysis in Tyne and Wear

A greater understanding of the impact of neighbourhood design on travel behaviour has long been sought as a way to shape sustainable mobility practice. The very reason for looking at this practice is to meet the future demand of settlements, which will improve air quality, reduce congestion, and create liveable neighbourhoods and reduce dependency on the private car. Whilst there is an extensive American literature on this subject, this is limited in applicability to European or British practice since the urban form variables, such as street layout and levels of car use in all areas, have a different scale. This study is concerned with the British experience of the relationship between neighbourhood design and travel behaviour. To this end a questionnaire has been developed to measure travel patterns, built environment characteristics and attitudes/preferences towards the current perception of residents about how their neighbourhood influences their travel and to identify and measure the causal relationship between the neighbourhood design and travel behaviour. Data from British Census 2001 and Google Earth TM have been used to identify and to control socio-economic variants of ten carefully selected neighbourhoods which characterise five traditional and five suburban neighbourhoods within the Tyne and Wear metropolitan conurbation. From the captured data of 716 respondents, this study explores the causation between perceived and preferred neighbourhood and travel attitude characteristics and reported vehicle miles driven (VMD). The results show that in the causal relationships, differences in reported VMD can be explained in order by socio-economic variables, travel attitudes, preferred neighbourhood characteristics, perceived neighbourhood characteristics and land-use type with traditional neighbourhoods being more sensitive to changes in VMD as compared to the suburban neighbourhoods. This suggests that land-use policy to promote sustainable mobility in traditional neighbourhoods would be more effective than if applied to the suburban counterpart. This study also explores the issue of residential self-selection where individuals or households choose their neighbourhood because of its neighbourhood characteristics. These are examined by the use and analysis of quasi-longitudinal data from respondents of the survey who had moved home in the previous eight years. The changes in level of car use, public transport use and walking are measured relative to the changes in neighbourhood characteristics for these respondents. The results show that some changes in neighbourhood characteristics are sensitive to changes in walking and public transport use, but less sensitive to changes in car driving. This finding suggests that the land-use policy designed to promote sustainable mobility practice through neighbourhood design could be used to generate more walking and more public transport use. Even though there is less evidence of reducing car travel, such a policy is likely to give individuals the choice to drive less and use public transport and walking more.