Excess Commuting and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem

By Mark W. Horner, Alan T. Murray. 2002

236 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Excess commuting has emerged during the past two decades as an important construct for evaluating the spatial relationships between employment and residential locations. During this time-period, there has been an on-going debate regarding how one should measure excess commuting in urban regions. This paper contributes to the debate by focusing on the spatial issues inherent in excess commuting evaluation. We demonstrate how scale and unit definition (the modifiable areal unit problem) are manifested in the assessment of excess commuting, both in theoretical and empirical terms. To this end, a geographical information systems-based analysis is presented which explores spatial sensitivities in the excess commuting measure. Our results show that aggregation and spatial unit definition may have profound impacts on the estimation of excess commuting. This work provides a formal resolution to much of the recent debate regarding estimates of excess commuting in urban regions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d0c995b7d24a691eb0c3ba265328dc3381ae710

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

In Transportation

Citations in the corpus

Journey-to-Work Patterns in the Age of Sprawl: Evidence from Two Midsize Southern Metropolitan Areas* (2007, background): “Instead, the question of the most appropriate scales and areas of analysis for sprawl should be examined, as it has been for other travel behavior topics ( Horner and Murray 2002 ; Sultana 2002 ; Hasse and Lathrop 2003a ).”
Accessibility and Transit-Oriented Development in European metropolitan areas (2015, unknown): “Furthermore, a number of important methodological issues arise with changing the scale for analysis (Horner and Murray, 2002; Kwan and Weber, 2008).”
Extensions to the Concept of Excess Commuting (2002, methodology): “Complete details of the Hamilton ^White debate are not given hereöreaders are referred to Small and Song (1992) and Horner and Murray (2002) for an overview of the relevant arguments.”
Spatial statistics for urban analysis: A review of techniques with examples (2004, methodology): “Horner and Murray (2002) use Boise (Idaho) for their analysis.”
Disaggregate Journey-to-Work Data: Implications for Excess Commuting and Jobs–Housing Balance (2005, background): “…a view to providing travel demand benchmarks (Badoe and Miller, 2000; Buliung and Kanaroglou, 2002; Cervero, 1989; 1991; Giuliano and Small, 1993; Hamilton, 1982; Horner, 2002; Horner and Murray, 2002; 2003; Levine, 1998; Peng, 1997; Rodriguez, 2004; Small and Song, 1992; UbÖe, 2004; White, 1988).”
Excess Commuting: A Critical Review (2006, background): “…analyses Buliung and Kanaroglou (2002) Toronto, Ont. distance 65 Commute length could be reduced by the policy directed at particular commuter groups Horner and Murray (2002) Boise, ID distance 26.2–48.1 Level of aggregation has a considerable impact on the excess commuting estimates Manning…”
The Built Environment and Motor Vehicle Ownership and Use: Evidence from Santiago de Chile (2010, background): “The early 21 st Century, while seeing further refined examination into topics like excess commuting (Horner and Murray, 2002; Yang, 2008), also ushered in a growing number of analyses looking specifically at the built environment’s influence on human activity levels and public health (Brown et al,…”
Jobs-Housing Balance in an Era of Population Decentralization: An Analytical Framework and a Case Study (2010, methodology): “The smallest planning units of TPUs in Hong Kong are used to minimize the complications caused by the modifiable areal unit problem (Horner and Murray, 2002).”