Abstract
With growing traffic congestion and environmental issues, the interactions between travel behaviour and the built environment have drawn attention from researchers and policymakers to take effective measures to encourage more sustainable travel modes and to curb car trips, especially in urbanising areas where travel demand is very complicated. This paper presents how built environmental factors affect public transit choice behaviour in urban villages in China, where a large population of low-income workers are accommodated. This location had a high demand for public transit and special built environmental characteristics. Multinomial logistic regression was employed to examine both the determinants and magnitude of their influence. The results indicate that the impacts of built environments apply particularly in urban villages compared to those in formal residences. In particular, mixed land use generates an adverse effect on public transit choice, a surprising outcome which is contrary to previous common conclusions. This study contributes by addressing a special type of neighbourhood in order to narrow down the research gap in this domain. The findings help to suggest effective measures to satisfy public transit demand efficiently and also provide a new perspective for urban regeneration.
Highlights
Public transit (PT) has gained increasing attention due to its significance in addressing environmental problems, limited urban land resources, job-housing unbalance issues as well as the demand for equity and equality of various classes of population in society with the advancing urbanisation process [1,2]
We omit “taxi” and “others”, because non-motorised, public transit (PT) and car travelling are the main travel modes in urban villages and formal residences, and we only want to know how advantageous PT is with respect to non-motorised and car modes
It is not much helpful to alter built environments to attract PT travellers to shift to non-motorised travelling in urban villages
Summary
Public transit (PT) has gained increasing attention due to its significance in addressing environmental problems, limited urban land resources, job-housing unbalance issues as well as the demand for equity and equality of various classes of population in society with the advancing urbanisation process [1,2]. PT is regarded as a sustainable travel mode, beneficial to both individuals and the society To individuals, it is an effective motorised mode, meeting the needs of medium and long distance urban trips, with a low level of cost and acceptable time consumption. Various groups of the population or different urban forms would generate distinct patterns of travel behaviour, so it would be more effective and significant to probe into a particular demand segment rather than the overall demand. The study reported in this paper chose a segment with large demand for PT but a lack of attention to certain characteristics of population and urban form, so as to provide specific policy suggestions for PT encouragement
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