Assessing the impact of urban form measures on nonwork trip mode choice after controlling for demographic and level-of-service effects

The relationship between travel behavior and the local built environment remains far from entirely resolved, despite several research efforts in the area. The current paper investigates the significance and explanatory power of a variety of urban form measures on nonwork activity travel mode choice. The travel data used for analysis is the 1995 Portland Metropolitan Activity Survey conducted by Portland Metro. The database on the local built environment was developed by Song (2002) and includes a more extensive set of variables than previous studies that have examined the relationship between travel behavior and the local built environment using the Portland data. The results of the multinomial logit mode choice model indicate that mixed-uses promote walking behavior for nonwork activities.