Measuring location in residential location choice: An empirical study on the canton of Zurich

In transportation and land-use research, discrete choice models have become a common method for assessing the value or utility of discrete alternatives for an individual choice-maker and have led to the simulation of land-use developments on a microscopic level. Discrete location choice models represent relocation behavior in those simulations and generally implement three groups of variables, representing attributes of the alternative, the decision-taker and the location. With the growing availability of spatial data on a disaggregated level, a large number of location variables have been reported in these models, which reduces their comparability and their transferability to other study areas. To address this limitation, Schirmer et al. (2012) classified location variables and proposed a common set of attributes as an initial setup. In this paper, we explore the impact of these attributes on residential location choice in the Canton of Zurich.