Road Expansion, Urban Growth, and Induced Travel: A Path Analysis

By Robert Cervero. 2001

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Claims that roadway investments spur new travel, known as induced demand, and thus fail to relieve traffic congestion have thwarted road development in the United States. Past studies point to a significant induced demand effect. This research employs a path model to causally sort out the links between freeway investments and traffic increases, using data for 24 California freeway projects across 15 years. Traffic increases are explained in terms of both faster travel speeds and land use shifts that occur in response to adding freeway lanes. While the path model confirms the presence of induced travel in both the short and longer run, estimated elasticities are lower than those of earlier studies. This research also reveals significant “induced growth” and “induced investment” effects—real estate development gravitates to improved freeways, and traffic increases spawn road investments over time. Travel-forecasting models are needed that account for these dynamics.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2fc66780ebcf44518162601436394c95f327fd8

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Citations in the corpus

Density and Dispersion: The Co-Development of Land Use and Rail in London (2007, background): “In transportation research, what has been dubbed the ”induced demand” problem has developed around it a literature that aims to measure (typically at the county or state level) how much additional trac (usually measured as vehicle miles (km) of travel) will result from additions to road capacity (us”
Smart Growth and the Transportation-Land Use Connection: What Does the Research Tell Us? (2005, methodology): “Cervero (2003), using a path model that sorted out the causal links between freeway investments and traffic increases and that focused on the direct impact on traffic of a change in speed rather than a change in freeway lane miles, found an elasticity of 0.24 for the near term, meaning that a 10…”
Induced Travel Demand: Research Design, Empirical Evidence, and Normative Policies (2002, methodology): “Cross-elasticities of demand for transit as a function of highway travel times, experiences show, are quite varied—studies have recorded values of 0.36 in the San Francisco Bay Area, 0.42 in Montreal, and 0.84 in greater Chicago (Cervero 1990).”