Preface

This field paper is for discussing the relationship between travel and urban form.1 The initial motivation is curious about how the travel distance is affected by urban densities. Is this relationship existed universally or just context-dependent? Are these models in literature replicable or reproducible? Part I reviews the related literature and tries to cover the main theories and research in this field. Travel patterns or behaviors as the variable of interest, is associated with many factors including urban form variables. To answer above questions, this field paper extends to different types of travel variables and more influencing factors.

The travel-urban form studies are many and perplexing. Part II introduces the common statistical methods for the question raised in Part I. Although emerging many new techniques in recent years, regression analysis is still the fundamental and explainable methodology. The first stage is to understand the different methods adapted in previous studies. After that, it could be possible to give suitable criticism or replicate the previous models.

Under the travel-urban form topic, one goal is to examine the validation of different models. A parallel study on known data may find the issues of mismatch or misreading, and to improve the relevant studies in the future. Another potential goal is to get some generalized association between travel and urban form. Based on many studies on the same topic, meta-analysis is a useful tool that can help to disclose publication bias in this field.

References

Xie, Yihui. 2015. Dynamic Documents with R and Knitr. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. http://yihui.name/knitr/.
———. 2021. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with r Markdown.

  1. This is a field paper using the bookdown package (Xie 2021), knitr (Xie 2015) and TinyTeX: https://yihui.name/tinytex/.↩︎