The Road Less Traveled

In JPER volume 15, Crane (1996b) challenged the New Urbanist arguments that urban design traits such as street orientation, density, mix of land uses, and transit access automatically get travelers to substitute walking and transit for personal auto-mobile use. The work presented here starts to address that point, formally testing New Urbanist ideas about travel mode substitution. Using data from the 1994 Household Activity and Travel Behavior Survey conducted in Portland, Oregon, these findings suggest New Urbanist concepts serve to increase walking substitution; transit is not affected. These findings hold even in the face of travelers self-selecting into specific residential environments.