Millennials, built form, and travel insights from a nationwide typology of U.S. neighborhoods

We examine the relationship between the built environment and the travel of Millennials in the United States. We develop a neighborhood typology to characterize the built environment and transportation networks in almost every U.S. census tract, allowing us to identify possible synergistic and/or threshold effects on travel. We measure travel behavior in two ways: (1) using a multi-faceted traveler typology created using latent class analysis, and (2) by measuring the vehicle miles of travel among people in each of these traveler types. This dual approach allows us to distinguish between the built environment changes needed to encourage travel by modes other than driving, and those needed to reduce vehicle miles traveled among drivers. Using a multinomial logistic regression, we find that travel patterns are relatively stable along much of the urban-rural continuum, everything else equal. Driving was substantially lower only in “Old Urban” neighborhoods, where densities, job access, and transit service are dramatically higher than in all other neighborhood types. This finding implies that dramatic changes in the built environment—doubling or even tripling development density or transit service—may do little to get young people out of their cars when initial densities or transit services are low, as they are in most of the U.S. Conversely, reducing vehicle miles traveled among drivers appears to require more modest built form changes, a finding that offers some room for optimism among those concerned with auto dependence.