THE TIME, COST, AND EFFORT OF TRANSPORTATION AND HOUSING
Accessibility matters. In the United States, Latin America, and Europe, residents dedicate nearly half of their spending to housing and transportation. They also dedicate a substantial proportion of their waking hours to travel. The trade-off between housing and transportation costs is central to the earliest models of urban form in idealized cities and to the most recent integrated transportation and land use models of actual cities. Although both types of models provide useful frameworks for understanding development patterns and the potential effects of land use and transportation policies, there are numerous challenges to incorporating real-world complexities into these modeling frameworks. In particular, it is difficult to model accurately the simultaneous location of firms and households, the relative importance of different types of land uses in firm and household decisions, the variety of transportation options, the heterogeneity in firm and household preferences, the role of land use regulation, the effect of new infrastructure, or the legacy of older infrastructure and building forms. There may also be differences between developed and developing cities that vary in nature and not only in degree. Each additional element of real-world complexity adds more nuance to the models but obscures the nature of the trade-offs between transportation costs, housing, and other land uses.
Accessibility matters. In the United States, Latin America, and Europe, residents dedicate nearly half of their spending to housing and transportation. They also dedicate a substantial proportion of their waking hours to travel. The trade-off between housing and transportation costs is central to the earliest models of urban form in idealized cities and to the most recent integrated transportation and land use models of actual cities. Although both types of models provide useful frameworks for understanding development patterns and the potential effects of land use and transportation policies, there are numerous challenges to incorporating real-world complexities into these modeling frameworks. In particular, it is difficult to model accurately the simultaneous location of firms and households, the relative importance of different types of land uses in firm and household decisions, the variety of transportation options, the heterogeneity in firm and household preferences, the role of land use regulation, the effect of new infrastructure, or the legacy of older infrastructure and building forms. There may also be differences between developed and developing cities that vary in nature and not only in degree. Each additional element of real-world complexity adds more nuance to the models but obscures the nature of the trade-offs between transportation costs, housing, and other land uses.