This paper examines empirical relationships among commuters’ mode choice, metropolitan urban form, and socioeconomic attributes in the 100 largest urban areas in the United States and Mexico. Fitting multinomial logit models to data for more than 5 million commuters and their home urban area, we find several consistent relationships and several important differences in relationships among urban form and travel behavior. In both countries, urban residents living in housing types associated with more centrally located housing in more densely populated urban areas with less roadway are less likely to commute by private vehicle than similar residents in other housing types and other urban areas. In addition to some differences in the strength, significance, and signs of several predictor variables, we find large differences in elasticity estimates across contexts. In particular, the US’s high rates of driving and generally car-friendly urban form mean that even dramatic shifts in urban form or income result in only small predicted changes in the probability of commuting by private vehicle. We conclude that land use and transportation policies likely have a more substantial role in shaping commute patterns in countries like Mexico than in countries like the US.

中文翻译：

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美国和墨西哥城市城市形态与模式选择的关系：工人通勤的比较分析

本文研究了美国和墨西哥 100 个最大城市地区的通勤者模式选择、大都市城市形态和社会经济属性之间的实证关系。将多项 logit 模型拟合到超过 500 万通勤者及其居住城市区域的数据中，我们发现了城市形态和出行行为之间存在一些一致的关系和几个重要的差异。在这两个国家，与居住在其他住房类型和其他城市地区的类似居民相比，居住在人口稠密、道路较少的城市地区的住房类型与位于市中心的住房相关的城市居民乘坐私家车通勤的可能性较小。除了几个预测变量的强度、显着性和符号的一些差异之外，我们发现不同背景下的弹性估计存在很大差异。特别是，美国的高驾驶率和普遍对汽车友好的城市形态意味着，即使城市形态或收入发生巨大变化，也只会导致私家车通勤概率的微小预测变化。我们得出结论，与美国等国家相比，在墨西哥等国家，土地使用和交通政策在塑造通勤模式方面的作用可能更大。