Abstract
This research examines the relationship between urban polycentric spatial structure and driving. We identified 46 employment sub-centers in the Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area and calculated access to jobs that are within and beyond these sub-centers. To address potential endogeneity problems, we use access to historically important places and transportation infrastructure in the early twentieth century as instrumental variables for job accessibility indices. Our Two-stage Tobit models show that access to jobs is negatively associated with household vehicle miles traveled in this region. Among various accessibility measures, access to jobs outside sub-centers has the largest elasticity (− 0.155). We examine the location of places in the top quintile of access to non-centered jobs and find that those locations are often inner ring suburban developments, near the core of the urban area and not far from sub-centers, suggesting that strategies of infill development that fill in the gaps between sub-centers, rather than focusing on already accessible downtowns and large sub-centers, may be the best land use approach to reduce VMT.
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Note: numbers 1 through 46 indicate the rank of the size of employment for each sub-center
Note: Map of the Red Car stations is from the Electric Railway Historical Association of Southern California (2017), Map of the Yellow Car lines is from sharemap.org (2017), Map of the 1939 Highway Plan is from City of Los Angeles Transportation Engineering Board (1939), and the location of the Los Angeles Plaza is georeferenced by Google Map
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by California Department of Transportation through the METRANS Transportation Center in task order 005-A01. The authors thank the Editor and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments.
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Boarnet, M.G., Wang, X. Urban spatial structure and the potential for vehicle miles traveled reduction: the effects of accessibility to jobs within and beyond employment sub-centers. Ann Reg Sci 62, 381–404 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-019-00900-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-019-00900-7