Neighbourhood Attributes towards Active Transportation

Over the past decades, automobile-oriented development along with a huge increase in car ownership has encouraged people to have fewer active travels and spends more times traveling by private cars. The negative consequences of this kind of travel behaviour have been highlighted in metropolitan areas such as Melbourne, Australia. Since suggestions on how active commuting behaviour incorporated in daily trips can be provided by understanding the current active transport network; this paper aims to investigate whether built environment features in neighbourhoods could enhance the odds of active transportation. The present study used a new index measuring public transport accessibility (PTAI) as well as other built environment factors such as land use mix entropy index, and roadway measure investigating mode choice behaviour. Data used in this study, has been obtained from Victorian Integrated Survey of Travel and Activity (VISTA, 2009). Multinomial Logit (MNL) regression model is applied to investigate the impacts of explanatory variables on transport mode choice. Findings indicated that high rates of active travel are consistently associated with more diverse used areas with higher levels of public transport accessibility.