Sponsor
Portland State University. School of Urban and Public Affairs
First Advisor
James G. Strathman
Term of Graduation
Spring 2002
Date of Publication
Spring 5-7-2002
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Urban Studies
Department
Urban Studies
Language
English
Subjects
Trip length, Highway capacity, Traffic congestion, Transportation -- Environmental aspects, Travel time (Traffic engineering)
Physical Description
1 online resource (xiii, 206 pages)
Abstract
The triple convergence principle, proposed by Anthony Downs, states that subsequent to increases in roadway supply, travelers change their travel route, time, and mode to mitigate the effect of lowering congestion levels. More recently, studies indicate that building roadways also induces people to drive more, a phenomenon called induced travel.
Using personal data from the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS) enriched with roadway supply data from the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), this dissertation studies travel behavioral responses of urban workers to roadway supply improvements. These responses include the possible additional travel amount as well as the spatial, temporal and modal redistribution of the trips. A seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE) model is estimated to simultaneously take into account induced travel amount in terms of personal vehicle miles of travel (PVMT), mode choice, job-house distance, and work trip departure time relative to the peak.
The estimation results show that urban workers travel more as measured by PVMT and they commute longer distances in metropolitan areas with higher levels of roadway supply. They also tend to less likely use bus to go to work, and travel closer to the peak hour, a phenomenon called peak-narrowing effect.
On the other hand, the small estimated coefficients of roadway supply suggest that the impact of roadway supply improvement on workers' travel is small in magnitude. Compared with household income, population densities at residence and employment density at workplace, roadway supply imposes larger impacts on departure time deviation from the peak and job-housing distance, but much smaller impacts on bus mode choice and PVMT. The effect of household income is about 5 times larger than that of roadway supply on PVMT. This indicates that induced travel may have only modest effect in project evaluation.
Because of the measurement errors in some variables and the inherit limitation of the SURE model, the estimation suffers some deficiency. Further research should focus on obtaining better measurements of roadway supply and on employing a more suitable model that can address the simultaneity problem as well as the contemporaneous relationships of multiple travel behavioral responses to roadway supply improvements.
Rights
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Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43052
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Jihong, "Multiple Convergence: Induced Travel Analysis in Metropolitan Areas" (2002). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 6766.
Included in
Other Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons, Science and Technology Studies Commons, Transportation Commons, Urban Studies Commons
Comments
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