Predicting Land Use Change: How Much Does Transportation Matter?

In this paper, we propose to measure the extent of the influence of transportation systems on land use change. Using a set of high-resolution land use data for the Twin Cities metropolitan region, we estimate logistic regression models of land use change covering a 10-year period from 1990 to 2000. The models account for existing land use types, neighboring land uses, and transportation network variables that measure the physical proximity of highway networks, as well as the level of accessibility associated with a specific location. The models are estimated with and without the transportation variables and compared to assess the extent of their influence. We find (perhaps not surprisingly) that transportation-related variables exert some influence on changes to land use patterns, though not as much as variables representing existing and neighboring land uses.