Sustainable travel is a goal deserving of research and implementation, but how such a goal can be reached is debated. Fueling this debate are the many different factors involved in individual travel ranging from values and beliefs to the impact of the built environment. The amount of impact that the built environment may have can be clouded by a person's personal preference for a certain lifestyle and different lifecycle stages have different levels of travel. Although low levels of automobile use have been observed in city centers, the question remains as to whether the demographics of the distinct developed areas can explain the differences. This paper investigated the fraction of automobile trips across different developed areas for households of distinct lifecycle stages to determine which explained the differences greater. The results suggest that it is the built environment that has a greater ability to explain the differences in the fraction of automobile trips and that households of the same lifecycle stage retain the same basic number of trips.
Factors that determine the attractiveness of a shopping street are examined empirically in this study, based on data obtained from the survey of visitors and establishments at six medium-sized shopping streets anchored by railway stations. The results of the analysis show: i) the visitor attraction of a shopping street is proportional to the passenger volume at the anchor railway stations, ii) larger shopping streets tend to have refined, higher-grade establishments, iii) shopping streets with smaller anchor stations may attract visitors with diverse establishments, and iv) unrefined and unpretentious urban space, which has not been the concern of organized urban development, is an important element of an attractive commercial district.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.