Bogotá, Colombia, is well known for its sustainable urban transport systems, including an extensive network of bike lanes and set-aside street space for recreational cyclists and pedestrians on Sundays and holidays, called Ciclovía (“cycleway”). This paper examines how such facilities along with other attributes of the built environment—urban densities, land-use mixes, accessibility, and proximity to transit—are associated with walking and cycling behavior as well as Ciclovía participation. We find that whereas road facility designs, like street density, connectivity, and proximity to Ciclovía lanes, are associated with physical activity, other attributes of the built environment, like density and land-use mixtures, are not. This is likely because most neighborhoods in built-up sections of Bogotá evolved during a time when non-automobile travel reigned supreme, meaning they are uniformly compact, mixed in their land-use composition, and have comparable levels of transport accessibility. Thus facility designs are what sway nonmotorized travel, not generic land-use attributes of neighborhoods.

The mobility challenges of the developing world are considerably different than those in wealthier, advanced countries, and so are the challenges of coordinating transportation and land use. Rapid population growth, poverty and income disparities, overcrowded urban cores, poorly designed road networks, spatial mismatches between housing and jobs, deteriorating environmental conditions, and economic losses from extreme traffic by congestion are among the more vexing challenges faced by developing cities that could be assuaged through improved coordination of transportation and urban development. This is underscored by examples reviewed in this paper from South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, India, Africa, and South America. It is concluded that whatever is done to improve transportation and land-use integration must be pro-poor. The cardinal features of integrated and sustainable transport and urbanism everywhere---accessible urban activities and safe, attractive walking and cycling environs---are particularly vital to the welfare and prosperity of urbanites in the world's poorest countries.

Hong Kong has aggressively pursued transit value capture to finance railway infrastructure through its ‘Rail + Property’ development programme, or R+P. More than half of all income to the railway operators comes from property development. Most R+P projects focus on housing although all have some commercial development. Recent generation R+P projects have stressed pedestrian quality. This research shows this has in turn increased ridership and housing prices. An R+P station with a transit-oriented design averages 35 000 additional weekday passengers. Housing price premiums in the range of 5—30 per cent were found. Hong Kong’s R+P model, it is suggested, is well suited for financing rail infrastructure and advancing transit-oriented designs in the rapidly growing cities of mainland China.

Transit-oriented development is shown to produce an appreciable ridership bonus in California. This is partly due to residential self-selection—that is, a lifestyle preference for transit-oriented living—as well as factors like employer-based policies that reduce free parking and automobile subsidies. Half-mile catchments of station areas appear to be indifference zones in the sense that residents generally ride transit regardless of local urban design attributes. Out-of-neighborhood attributes, like job accessibility and street connectivity at the destination, on the other hand, have a significant bearing on transit usage among station-area residents. The presence of self-selection, shown using nested logit modeling, underscores the importance of removing barriers to residential mobility so that households are able to sort themselves, via the marketplace, to locations well served by transit. Market-responsive zoning, flexible residential parking policies, location efficient mortgages, and adaptive reuse of parking lots are also promising tools for expanding the supply of transit-based housing.

(2017). “Does Compact Development Make People Drive Less?” The Answer Is Yes. Journal of the American Planning Association: Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 19-25.

Current methods of traffic impact analysis, which rely on rates and adjustments from the Institute of Transportation Engineers, are believed to understate the traffic benefits of mixed-use developments (MXDs), leading to higher exactions and development fees than necessary and discouraging otherwise desirable developments. The purpose of this study is to create new methodology for more accurately predicting the traffic impacts of MXDs. Standard protocols were used to identify and generate data sets for MXDs in six large and diverse metropolitan regions. Data from household travel surveys and geographic information system (GIS) databases were pooled for these MXDs, and travel and built environmental variables were consistently defined across regions. Hierarchical modeling was used to estimate models for internal capture of trips within MXDs, walking and transit use on external trips, and trip length for external automobile trips. MXDs with diverse activities on-site are shown to capture a large share of tr...