Neighborhood Crime and Travel Behavior: An Investigation of the Influence of Neighborhood Crime Rates on Mode Choice, MTI Report 07-02

While much attention has been given to the influence of urban form on travel behavior in recent years, little work has been done on how neighborhood crimes affect this dynamic. This research project studied seven San Francisco Bay Area cities, and found substantiation for the proposition that neighborhood crime rates have an influence on the propensity to choose non-automotive modes of transportation for home-based trips. Specifically, high vice and vagrancy crime rates were associated with a lowered probability of choosing transit in suburban cities for both work and non-work trips, high property crime rates were associated with a lower probability of walking for work trips in urban cities and inner-ring suburban cities, high violent crime rates with a lower probability of walking for work trips in suburban study cities, while higher property crime rates in San Francisco were associated with an increased probability of walking for non-work trips. While the signs of these significant relationships generally conformed to the author’s expectations—i.e., that high crime rates reduce the probability of choosing non-automotive modes of travel—the authors did not find statistically significant relationships for all city/trip model runs, suggesting that these relationships differ depending on the urban form and trip type contexts

The significance of distance constraints in peasant farming systems with special reference to sub-Saharan Africa

Analysis of agricultural development potential at village level tends to neglect the factor of relative location, compared with the attention paid to physical resources and economic factors. This paper argues that, in African peasant agriculture, distance takes on increasing significance when farming populations are resettled and agglomerated, there being little intensification in evidence. The impacts of agglomeration and excessive ‘journeys to work’ are identified as affecting the quantity and the quality of agricultural labour inputs, the collection of domestic necessities (especially fuelwood), livestock husbandry, and socio-cultural and welfare conditions.\ud \ud Some simple analyses of time-distance relations, such as the ‘effective working day’, are also described, and a model of peasant decision-making with respect to optimizing farm activity location is proposed as a descriptive-explanatory tool. Response to distance problems is considered as part of rural change; and the particular position of peasant women vis-à-vis distance and transport technology is stressed. Data collection methods and descriptive statements of the spatial relationships within a village, or an agro-ecological zone, are outlined within the framework of rapid rural appraisal. Finally, a number of potential solutions to the agro-economic distance problem are briefly discussed—either as changes in farming systems, or as redistributions of the working population. Changes with the greatest potential are intensification and satellite settlements, though both face difficulties in policy and in implementation

Integrated Modeling Approach for the Transportation Disadvantaged

Transportation models have not been adequate in addressing severe long-term urban transportation problems that transportation disadvantaged groups overwhelmingly encounter, and the negative impacts of transportation on the disadvantaged have not been effectively considered in the modeling studies. Therefore this paper aims to develop a transportation modeling approach in order to understand the travel patterns of the transportation disadvantaged, and help in developing policies to solve the problems of the disadvantaged. Effectiveness of this approach is tested in a pilot study in Aydin, Turkey. After determining disadvantaged groups by a series of spatial and statistical analyses, the approach is integrated with a travel demand model. The model is run for both disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged populations to examine the differences between their travel behaviors. The findings of the pilot study reveal that almost two thirds of the population is disadvantaged, and this modeling approach could be particularly useful in disadvantage-sensitive planning studies to deploy relevant land use and transportation policies for disadvantaged groups