Effects of Urban Spatial Form on Individuals’ Footprints: Empirical Study Based on Personal GPS Panel Data from Rotterdam and Eindhoven Area

It is crucial for urban planners to understand the effects of physical planning on individuals’ behavior. A well-designed built environment allows individuals to engage in activities at shorter travel distances, using environmentally friendly transport modes. This paper examines how individuals’ CO2 footprints co-vary with urban form indicators. GPS technology was used to collect activity-travel data. The data for the analyses were collected between May 2012 and July 2013 covering more than 200 respondents from the Eindhoven and Rotterdam regions, the Netherlands. The data includes personal and household characteristics, detailed travel information, GPS traces and detailed car information, including brand, type and year of production. A Bayesian network was used to extract activity-travel diaries from the collected GPS traces, while a Web-based prompted recall survey instrument was used to validate the imputed data. To identify their living environment, respondents’ home coordinates were matched with map data from the municipality. A two-stage sample selection model was used to estimate the effects of physical planning on individual transport mode choice and daily CO2 emissions.