Understanding the Effect of Built Environment on Travel Behavior at Multiple Geographic Scales

Understanding the effect of built environment on travel behavior has been an important research issue in transportation, geography, and urban planning. Geographic scales for travel behavior research have started attracting attentions in recent years. In this research, we proposed a method to extract suitable geographic scales of built environment influence on travel behavior with different travel purposes. We designed a modeling framework to examine different types of corresponding scales that affect the relationships between travel behavior and the built environment. The scale-correspondence covers the aspects of geography, model, and indicators. In a real travel data supported case study, the results show a stronger and more explainable influence from built environment on travel distance and travel mode choices at scale-corresponding models than that with the non-scale-corresponding models. We discovered that all three types of scale correspondence can reduce the geographic-contextual uncertainty in both travel and built environment contexts. The results of this study offer methodological insights that may facilitate further research investigating travel behaviors.