The recent and dramatic growth in ride-hailing activity is a bellwether of a coming transportation revolution driven by on-demand services. The impacts of ride-hailing services on the transportation system have been immediate and major. Yet, public agencies are only beginning to understand their magnitude because the private ride-hailing industry has provided limited amounts of meaningful data. Consequently, public agencies responsible for managing congestion and providing transit services are unable to clearly determine who uses ride-hailing services and how their adoption influences established travel modes, or forecast the potential growth of this emergent mode in the future. To address these pressing questions, an intercept survey of ride-hailing passengers was conducted in the Greater Boston region in fall 2017. Ten ride-hailing drivers, recruited and trained by the authors, asked passengers to complete surveys during their ride-hailing trip. The tablet-based survey instrument recorded nearly 1,000 passenger responses with regard to socioeconomic background, mobility options, and trip context. These responses, which enabled a robust description of ride-hailing passengers for the region, were used to analyze how new on-demand mobility services such as Uber and Lyft may be substituting travel by other modes. The study substantiates previous findings and advances knowledge of who is utilizing this new mobility option and what factors influence its adoption over public and active transportation modes. The results are intended to inform public policies ensuring that shared mobility technologies will complement existing multimodal landscapes and not worsen existing environmental concerns or equity gaps related to individual mobility.

Urban planning and public-health research has long been interested in the connection between land-use mix and travel. Interest from urban planners stems from the potential of transportation efficiency gains achieved by an increased land-use mix and subsequent shortening of trip lengths; whereas, public-health research advocates an increased land-use mix as an effective policy for facilitating greater physical activity. Yet, despite the transportation, land-use, and health benefits related to improving land-use mix and the extent of topical attention given by researchers, no consensus has been reached regarding the magnitude of its effect on travel. This absence of agreement may largely be attributed to the theoretical and methodological failings persistent in present attempts to accurately reflect land-use interaction and operationalize its quantification within a defined spatial extent. To better evaluate the impact of land-use mix on travel behavior and assess more temporal policies, a robust mix measure accounting for these two elements of land-use interaction and geographic scale as well as a temporal element of land-use mixing-missing from present specifications-must be introduced. This paper establishes the research agenda for a spatial-temporal land-use mix measure by (1) identifying the conceptual and methodological faults inherent to current land-use interaction and geographic-scale representations and (2) describing strategies and practical benefits of representing the temporal availability of landuse mixing in guiding innovative transportation/land-use policies.

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Although substantial consideration has been given to analyzing the relationship between land use diversity and travel behavior, the selection of the most suitable geographic scale for operationalizing these measures has received considerably less attention in the research. General consensus favors an examination of the complex relationship between travel behavior and such built environment measures explained at a finer spatial scale. The reasons for supporting a more disaggregate neighborhood scale include statistical advantages, such as a minimization of the modifiable areal unit problem, and more applied intentions, such as a preference for site-specific design measures seen as responsive to urban policy. Complementing this decision about how best to define the geographic extent of the built environment is the determination of which built environment measures are significantly related to travel mode choice. Of these measures, an increased diversity of land uses has often been linked with an individual's heightened likelihood for using transit, bicycling, and walking. This research advances the knowledge of which land use diversity measures best predict mode choice and explores the proper geographic scale for operationalizing these indicators. Seven diversity indexes represented at four geographic scales encompassing the origins and destinations of discretionary trips in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan region were examined with a series of multinomial logit models. This study, which introduced several indexes previously unrecognized in transportation research, suggests common diversity measures, and the most disaggregate spatial scale may not always best represent the link between land use diversity and nonautomotive travel.

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