While people with disabilities have different travel patterns compared with the general traveller population, such discrepancies are ignored in mainstream travel demand modelling and planning practice. The failure to represent the diverse travel behaviour of people with disabilities leads to inaccurate forecasting and poor decision-making and exacerbates transportation disadvantages. Thus, this systematic review synthesises previous studies of travel behaviours among people with disabilities, differing from people without disabilities, in terms of trip frequency, mode choice, travel time and distance, and barriers. This review identified 115 peer-reviewed studies of the daily travel patterns of individuals across three categories of disabilities—mobility, cognitive, and sensory. Our review reveals that persons with disabilities make 10–30% fewer trips than those without disabilities, particularly non-work trips. Another significant difference is in travel mode choice—increased uses of public transit and taxi and riding with others and decreased walking and driving among those with disabilities. People with disabilities are prone to utilising slower means of transportation and travelling shorter distances. The quantitative review highlighted a limited considertation of the built environment characteristics and temporal factors as travel behavour predictors. Further, our qualitative review shows that despite a high level of adaptation, persons with disabilities encounter many barriers in the built environment to their transportation access. The environmental, social, and system barriers make specific modes unavailable to travellers with disabilities, increase travel time, and eventually decrease their trip frequency. This paper provides implications for travel demand modelling and urban and transportation planning and policy that better supports the transportation needs of persons with disabilities.
Problem, research strategy, and findings: The monocentric development pattern in the Alonso–Mills–Muth model underpinned theoretical discussions of urban form in the 1960s and 1970s and truly dominated theory up to the point when Joel Garreau published Edge City: Life on the New Frontier in the early 1990s. Monocentric development patterns remain dominant to this day among smaller metropolitan areas in the United States. However, for larger metropolitan areas in the United States, regional transportation plans suggest a paradigm shift to a polycentric structure. We review 126 regional transportation plans in the United States and find that a hierarchy of centers connected by high-quality transit has become the dominant vision for most of them. The plan for Salt Lake City (UT), for example, strives for a multicentered region even though secondary centers are only beginning to emerge beyond a dominant downtown. Generally missing from regional transportation plans are quantitative criteria for designating and guiding centers: In no case are the quantitative criteria empirically based on proven transportation benefits. Here we investigate how the built environment characteristics of centers are associated with people’s travel mode choices and vehicle use. We employ visual and exploratory approaches through a generalized additive model (GAM) to identify nonlinear relationships between travel outcomes and “D” variables (density, diversity, design, destination accessibility, and distance to transit) within centers. The model and plots help us recommend the built environment characteristics of centers. Takeaway for practice: The built environment thresholds and relevant tools provided here can enable planners to make informed decisions about future growth patterns, set realistic—yet visionary—goals, and improve the overall health of its residents and communities. We provide strategies and tools that planning agencies, such as metropolitan planning organizations, transit agencies, and municipalities, can adopt to channel developments into centers.