The impact of local work and residential balance on vehicle miles traveled: A new direct approach

This paper introduces a new approach for explaining the effects of spatial competition for opportunities based on a cumulative opportunities measure of accessibility. We focus on the case of the labor market where some municipalities offer too few workplaces for their local population, forcing some of their residents to long drives. We apply this new accessibility measure to explain households' annual mileage in Switzerland using a Heckman model to account for carless households. We find that car travel demand is much greater in municipalities with a relative undersupply in the local labor market compared to a balanced or oversupplied local labor market. The results show that driving increases with greater distance to the labor market center. The model estimates allow policy makers and planners to quantify as a first assessment the expected average mileage in each municipality for new settlements and to identify municipalities with low expected annual mileage.