Abstract
There is a vast literature on the relationship between built environment and travel, emphasizing the importance of built environment as a determinant of travel. However, the majority of studies focuses on the characteristics of origins and neglects the influence that the destination might have on travel, despite the already demonstrated importance of destinations to explain travel. In this paper, we test the relationship between residential and workplace built environment and the commuting pattern of staff and students of the University of Lisbon, a multi-campus university. Data was obtained through a dedicated travel survey, containing 1474 georeferenced individuals. Chi-square analyses were developed to analyze differences between staff and students and between different campuses. A logistic regression model was developed to explain car commuting, controlling for socio-demographic data. Two different models were developed for students and staff.
 
 Our results show the built environment and associated multimodal accessibility of the campuses are important explanatory variables of commuting. Free parking at the campus is crucial for car commuting, especially for students. These results emphasize the importance of measuring destinations as explanatory variables and promoting good urban integration of the campus in the city, increasing its multimodal accessibility.
Highlights
There is a vast literature on the relationship between the built environment and travel, emphasizing the importance of the built environment as a determinant of travel
Through a comparison of five urban campuses, we evaluate to what extent the travel behavior of students and staff can be explained by the built environment of the campus, regardless of the built environment of their residence
Almost all staff members have a driver’s license (93.3%), while only 70.2% of students have one, which is quite high for a young population, in which 80.3% are less than 25 years old
Summary
There is a vast literature on the relationship between the built environment and travel, emphasizing the importance of the built environment as a determinant of travel. The focus of the majority of studies is on the characteristics of origins (the location of the home) and they neglect the influence that the destination might have on travel, despite the already demonstrated importance of destinations in explaining travel. The built environment of destinations has been pointed out as more important than the built environment of origins in explaining mobility patterns for several travel modes (Forsyth, Hearst, Oakes, & Schmitz, 2008; McNeil, 2011; Millward, Spinney, & Scott, 2013; Vale & Pereira, 2016), especially if the destination is a regular, consistent destination such as the workplace (Chatman, 2003). The uncertain geographical context problem (Kwan, 2012) gives further support to the importance of destinations in explaining travel behavior, since spatiotemporal variability is extremely important in understanding the real exposure of an individual throughout the day, to air pollution and associated health risks (Park & Kwan, 2017), and to different space-time accessibility conditions (Miller, 2007; Weber & Kwan, 2002), which might exert a strong influence on mode choice and associated travel behavior
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