Modeling the Choice Continuum: an Integrated Model of Residential Location, Auto Ownership, Bicycle Ownership, and Commute Tour Mode Choice Decisions

The integrated modeling of land use and transportation involves analyzing the entire choice continuum defining people’s lifestyles across temporal scales. This includes long term choices such as residential and work location choices, medium term choices such as vehicle and bicycle ownership, and short term choices such as mode choice and trip departure time choice. In recent times, there has been increasing interest in modeling these choice dimensions simultaneously to account for endogeneity of longer term location choices, residential self-selection effects, and simultaneity of choice processes that define a person’s lifestyle. This paper presents an integrated simultaneous multi-dimensional choice model of residential location, vehicle ownership, bicycle ownership, and commute tour mode. The model system is formulated and estimated on a data set from the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States. Model estimation results show that it is possible to link long term, medium term, and short term choices in a multidimensional simultaneous equations model that captures endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity.