A lifestyle-based model of household neighbourhood location and individual travel mode choice behaviours

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hierarchical model that simultaneously captures how household lifestyles and modality styles influence neighborhood location and individual travel mode choices, addressing gaps in understanding intra-household interactions and lifestyle effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hierarchical Latent Class Choice Model that integrates lifestyle and modality style influences on household and individual travel decisions.

Findings

The model effectively captures the influence of lifestyles on travel behavior.

Intra-household interactions significantly affect travel mode choices.

The framework provides insights for land use and transportation policy design.

Abstract

Issues such as urban sprawl, congestion, oil dependence, climate change and public health, are prompting urban and transportation planners to turn to land use and urban design to rein in automobile use. One of the implicit beliefs in this effort is that the right land-use policies will, in fact, help to reduce automobile use and increase the use of alternative modes of transportation. Thus, planners and transport engineers are increasingly viewing land use policies and lifestyle patterns as a way to manage transportation demand. While a substantial body of work has looked at the relationship between the built environment and travel behaviour, as well as the influence of lifestyles and lifestyle-related decisions on using different travel modes and activity behaviours, limited work has been done in capturing these effects simultaneously and also in exploring the effect of intra-household interaction on individual attitudes and beliefs towards travel and activity behavior, and their subsequent influence on lifestyles and modality styles. Therefore, for this study we proposed a framework that captures the concurrent influence of lifestyles and modality styles on both household-level decisions, such as neighbourhood location, and individual-level decisions, such as travel mode choices using a hierarchical Latent Class Choice Model.