Association between Facility Location Agglomeration and Car Dependency: A Case of Japanese Cities

Abstract

The location of facilities and mode choice have complex relationships, which makes difficult to understand the factors shaping urban form. This research provides quantified evidence on the association between the agglomeration of commercial facilities and car dependency. This study defines the agglomeration index as a ratio of the average Euclidian distance between commercial facilities and public facilities in a city, given the assumption that agglomeration phenomena would not exist for certain types of public facilities (schools and hospitals in the empirical analysis). The empirical results conducted for 69 Japanese cities show that there is no significant association between agglomeration and car dependency, which is not consistent with our initial expectation. We discuss the possible reasons behind it.