Built Environment or Household Life-Cycle Stages–-Which Explains Sustainable Travel More?

Abstract

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.

Detangling the impacts of age, residential locations and household lifecycle in car usage and ownership in the Osaka metropolitan area, Japan

“…Wachs (1979) argued that early-stage households behave in a similar fashion to later-stage households that exist today. Sun et al (2012) showed that a companion cohort effect existed for car usage over time, while previous studies (Benekohal et al, 1994;Newbold et al, 2005;Sun et al, 2009) found that different age groups of people have different behaviors with respect to car ownership and usage.…”

“…Based on research about children's travel in the USA, one might assume that this is the result of chauffeuring, but research in Japan (SBSJ, 2000;Sun et al, 2009) showed that children there mostly travel independently on weekdays, which is Tables 3 and 4 as well. The second reason might be that as individuals enter into family lifecycle stages that stimulate the desire for a larger residence, each successive generation generally locates further from the urban centers leading to longer trip times and potentially greater reliance on cars for transportation.…”

“…Previous work that examined this question (Sun et al, 2009; found that the built environment explained more car usage than lifecycle stage. It is interesting to note that even in the most extreme cases the proportion of trips by car of household travel is only roughly 50%.…”

“…While the tendencies in travel, so far, have been expanding over time in terms of total travel time, distance, car usage, energy consumption, and the spatial extension of their action space (Krizek, 2003;Susilo and Kitamura, 2005;Scheiner, 2006;Sun et al, 2009;Susilo and Waygood, 2012), it is not clear whether these trends will continue in the future, especially due to the aging of the urban population and also that some evidence of plateauing car usage has been found (Millard-Ball and Schipper, 2011).…”

Using trip chaining and joint travel as mediating variables to explore the relationships among travel behavior, socio-demographics and urban form

“…Their study also suggests that household income has positive impacts on traveling with family members. Households' life-cycle stages and children's attributes, such as the presence of children in households and the age of the youngest child, influence parents' activity-travel patterns significantly (McDonald, 2005;McDonald, 2006;Sun, Waygood, Fukui, & Kitamura, 2009;Tillberg Mattsson, 2002;Waygood, 2011). Multiple studies indicate that children at different ages impose different constraints on joint travel patterns as children's ages increase, the burden of adult chauffeuring and supervision decreases (Ho & Mulley, 2015;Vovsha et al, 2003;Vovsha & Petersen, 2005).…”