The Impacts of Interactive Accessibility Information on Residential Location Choice and Travel Behavior: An Experimental Study

Abstract

2 Due to the impact of increasing road congestion and automobile dependency, and rising concerns 3 with urban sprawl and pollution, there is a critical need to develop effective strategies that can 4 foster more sustainable travel behavior. Information intervention strategies have been widely 5 applied to influence short-term travel behavior (e.g. route choice), but rarely been found effective 6 to affect long-term travel behavior (e.g. sustainable mode choice). This paper proposes an 7 interactive accessibility information intervention strategy to study the impacts of interactive 8 accessibility information on residential location choice and downstream travel behavior. An 9 interactive online accessibility mapping application (a key component of the proposed strategy) is 10 designed and developed to provide users personalized accessibility information based on their 11 travel needs and assist their residential location decision-making process. To evaluate the 12 effectiveness of the proposed strategy, an experiment is designed with participants selected from 13 the population relocating to Tippecanoe County, Indiana. Participants in the experimental group 14 have the access to the interactive online accessibility mapping application before they make 15 residential location choice, while participants in the control group do not. Residential location 16 choices and travel behaviors of all participants were collected two months after they confirmed 17 relocation. The results show that participants in the experimental group increased the importance 18 of accessibility in their residential location decision-making process, selected housing in 19 neighborhoods with better access to different potential destinations using different modes of 20 transportation (including walk, bicycle, public transit, and automobile), traveled less by 21 automobile (lower automobile mode share and shorter average travel time), and chose walk and 22 public transit more often compared to participants in the control group. In addition, the interactive 23 online accessibility mapping application is built on generally variable data with straightforward 24 development and implementation processes, thereby can be readily replicable throughout a range 25 of metropolitan context by planners and policy-makers. The proposed strategy can also be 26 beneficial to relocating population by reducing the mismatch between their preferred residential 27 locations and their selected residential location, and enabling more sustainable travel behavior.

29 Keywords: information intervention; residential location choice; travel behavior

Y. Guo, and S. Peeta 2