Is the Journey to Work Explained by Urban Structure?
- 1 November 1993
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Urban Studies
- Vol. 30 (9), 1485-1500
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00420989320081461
Abstract
Basic to several key issues in current urban economic theory and public policy is a presumption that local imbalances between employment and residential sites strongly influence people's commuting patterns. We examine this presumption by finding the commuting pattern for the Los Angeles region in 1980 which would minimise average commuting time or distance, given the actual spatial distributions of job and housing locations. We find that the amount of commuting required by these distributions is far less than actual commuting, and that variations in required commuting across job locations only weakly explain variations in actual commuting. We conclude that other factors must be more important to location decisions than commuting cost, and that policies aimed at changing the jobs-housing balance will have only a minor effect on commuting.Keywords
This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit:
- Subcenters in the Los Angeles regionRegional Science and Urban Economics, 1991
- Wasteful commuting: A re-examinationJournal of Urban Economics, 1991
- Wasteful Commuting AgainJournal of Political Economy, 1989
- Jobs-Housing Balancing and Regional MobilityJournal of the American Planning Association, 1989
- What Happened to the CBD-Distance Gradient?: Land Values in a Policentric CityEnvironment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 1989
- Research Policy and Review 27. New Directions for Understanding Transportation and Land UseEnvironment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 1989
- Research Policy and Review 25. Modeling Land Use and Transportation: An Interpretive Review for Growth AreasEnvironment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 1988
- The Distribution of Population and Employment in a Polycentric City: The Case of Los AngelesEnvironment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 1986
- Wasteful CommutingJournal of Political Economy, 1982
- Locational Preferences in the Urban Housing MarketJournal of the American Institute of Planners, 1961