Location, location, relocation: how the relocation of offices from suburbs to the inner city impacts commuting on foot and by bike

Yngve Frøyen,Ray Pritchard

doi:10.1186/s12544-019-0348-6

Abstract

PurposeIn recent decades there has been increasing focus on the development of compact and accessible urban environments, in part based on the reasoning that this can help to reduce the transportation requirements of city residents. Travel intensive land uses such as office workplaces are often offered incentives from policy makers to relocate to central locations well served by public transport (transit oriented development). To date, the academic literature on integrated transport and land use planning has largely been focused on the reduction of private car usage and promotion of public transport. This paper adds a complementary dimension, testing the hypothesis that intra-city workplace relocation towards city centres promotes walking and bicycling.MethodsThis paper uses a comparative case study method. Employee travel surveys were conducted before and after the 2015 relocation of an office workplace in Trondheim, Norway from urban periphery to city centre. Three similar office relocation cases in Trondheim and Oslo (post-2000) are used for comparison to the case study. Changes in travel distance, time, costs, optimal route and potential for walking and bicycling in the case study are considered alongside actual changes in transport mode.ResultsWalking and bicycling levels have a clear inverse relationship with distance to the city centre, due in large part to reduced commuting distances and increased parking costs following relocation. For the case study, the modal share of walking and cycling increased by a factor of 2.5 and 2.8 respectively. Relocation similarly led to a tripling in the number of case study employees who have a commute distance of less than 6 km, the employees’ median acceptable cycling distance. Active commuting levels from the former and current workplace locations match closely with the share of active commuting in the Norwegian National Travel Survey data for the corresponding neighbourhoods.ConclusionAlthough the function of workplaces and their employees can vary significantly within a city neighbourhood, travel behaviour is to a large extent determined by supply variables like time and cost. Central workplace locations with good public transport accessibility are shown to create significantly improved opportunities for walking, cycling and public transport commuting compared to peripheral workplaces with little competition to workplace accessibility by car.

Highlights

The importance of accessibility on the travel patterns of urban dwellers is well documented through comparisons of cities, city districts and even suburbs [1]
2 Background This study focuses upon relocation towards city centres as a result of a reversal in land use policies that catered for the exact opposite: decentralisation or suburbanisation
4.1 Mode share and case comparison In general the Adresseavisen office relocation resulted in large increases in the percentage of employees commuting by bicycle and on foot, the changes were much less pronounced for female employees

Summary

Introduction

The importance of accessibility on the travel patterns of urban dwellers is well documented through comparisons of cities, city districts and even suburbs [1]. Planners at the time observed this mismatch in supply and demand of public space and began major road and highway expansions, increasing the urban footprint In time, this allowed for the introduction of employment decentralisation policies under the logic that this would reduce both traffic flows through overloaded city centres and the distance between employers and their workforces [10]. The vast majority of literature concerning company relocation has been focused on movement away from the city centre to the suburbs or more general trends towards suburbanisation This applies for studies performed outside of Norway ([10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]; Geographic Institute of Utrecht University 1990 in [20]) to those within Norway [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]. This finding is echoed for two Norwegian follow-up surveys in Trondheim [28] and Oslo [29]

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Conclusion