Another Look at Travel Patterns and Urban Form: The US and Great Britain

This paper explores the relationship between land-use patterns and individual mobility from a comparative international perspective. There is a vast literature on US automobile dependence. Major explanatory factors include: transport, housing, land-use and tax policy; per capita incomes; American cultural preferences; national geography; and the spatial structure of US metropolitan areas (itself a result of the first three factors). Emphasising the policy environment, many researchers have cast their analysis in comparative terms, noting the differences in automobile use between European countries and the US. It is argued that US patterns of metropolitan form, with low development densities and dispersed population and employment, reinforce vehicle dependence. In contrast, most European metropolitan areas, with higher densities and more centralised land-use patterns, have lower levels of car use. Stronger controls on land use employed in many European countries are seen as having preserved the compact form of metropolitan areas. These arguments imply significant relationships between land-use patterns and travel behaviour. Using travel diary data from the US and Great Britain, these relationships are compared across the two countries. It is found that differences in daily trips and miles travelled are explained by differences in both the urban form and household income. While the effect of income on daily travel is similar for the US and Great Britain, the effect of density is more pronounced in the US.