DRAFT Technical Background on the Impacts of Land Use Mix Based on a Review of the Empirical Literature

The review and meta-analysis conducted by Ewing and Cervero (2010) identifies a total of 17 studies that deal with the relationship between vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and land use mix, and a subset of those studies was used as the primary evidence for this brief. The studies that were included in the analysis met two criteria. First, the effect on VMT must have been statistically significant at no less than a 90 percent level. Second, the study must have been conducted on an urban area that was similar to the California context. This left a total of five representative studies with a range of elasticities from -0.02 to -0.11. The primary studies cited by Ewing and Cervero (2010) were reviewed directly, and the results discussed in the brief are based on a review of those studies and the literature, not on the meta-analysis in Ewing and Cervero (2010). It is worth noting that the Ewing and Cervero’s meta-analysis result for elasticity for land use mix is in the range of -0.02 to -0.11, and the impacts in the studies that were not included in the brief generally fell within the same range of values.