What makes travel ‘local’: Defining and understanding local travel behavior

Abstract

In recent years, land use and transportation planning priorities have shifted from issues of mobility to focus on the capacity of neighborhoods to provide opportunities to live, work, shop, and socialize at the local scale. This research explores a sample of households from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, that engaged in multiple trip purposes on the same day and measures the effects of household, individual, and trip characteristics on their travel behavior, especially the localization of these trips. A new measure to understand the spatial dispersal of actual activity space of each household is proposed while controlling for distance traveled. The findings show that levels of regional and local accessibility have different effects on this new index. Furthermore, these effects vary with household size and socio-demographic factors. This study could help transportation professionals who are aiming to develop policies to localize household travel patterns through land use and transportation coordination at the neighborhood and regional scale. As wealthier car-owning households are seen to exhibit more dispersed travel behavior regardless of accessibility measures, implications for social equity and exclusion are also explored.