Heterogeneity in the relationship between the built environment and driving: Focus on neighborhood type and travel purpose

The results show that VMT sensitivity to built environment characteristics does depend on both neighborhood type and the purpose of travel, in ways that are intuitive but had not previously been estimated. This calls into question the usefulness of prior research that provides only single point estimates of the relationships between travel choices and the built environment. Though these relationships may be small on average, this work shows that for certain trip types and in certain neighborhood types, the built environment is strongly related to travel choices.