Host: Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies
Pages 128
The paper examines commuting bahvior to employment sub-centers in metropolitan regions. Traffic analysis zones are arranged in order of employment density to identify discrete clusters of similar characteristics. For each employment zone an employment location specific prefrence function for the journey to work is constructed. This allows comarison of the spatial extent of each employment center labor market. The mean trip length for the commute to each employment center is explained by the parameters of the quadratic function that describes the prefrence function. Results are presented for the city of Sapporo, Japan, where the models were calibrated on data for 1972, 1983 and 1994. Growth in population and employment with a polycetric employment formation in the suburbs has led to an increase in the region's mean trip length.
