RESULTADOS DE ENCUESTAS DIRIGIDAS A DOCENTES Cuadro No

Planners have been aiming at creating complete communities since the dawn of the profession during the days of Ebenizer Howard at the turn of the 20th _century.

Howard’s vision was one of semi-autonomous communities, Garden Cities, that physically contain all the necessary aspects of community life, including employment,

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but with strong connections to a greater metropolitan region (Howard & Osborn, 1965). The idea of complete communities was revived with the New Towns movement in the United States and Europe (Burby & Weiss, 1976), and reached beyond to other countries as well (Lee & Ahn, 2005). However for the most part these Garden Cities and New Towns have failed over time to be self-contained with regards to commuting trips

(Cervero, 1995, 1998). Given the range of residential and employment choices available in a sizable metropolitan region, residents rarely choose to work and live in the same community if they have high levels of mobility. However not all trips are worthy of lengthy metropolitan-scale ventures, and so planners have responded by seeking to create a more modest version of completeness – one where most of a household’s regular needs and at least some employment opportunities are distributed at activity centers located throughout a metropolitan region and therefore in closer proximity to where households live. This goal of being able to meet most of one’s nonwork needs at a local activity center lives on in the idea of the complete community.

This interest in creating a series of relatively compact and local complete

communities where residents are able to conduct the regular functions of their daily lives remains an active goal within contemporary comprehensive plans (City of Vancouver, 2003; Ontario Ministry of Infrastructure, 2006; Wood, Frank, & Giles-Corti, 2010). In part this may be a reaction against the trend of growth in nonwork travel distances; for example, shopping VMT has increased by 278% since national household transportation surveys began in 1969, whereas commuting VMT has increased just 60% (Santos,

McGuckin, Nakamoto, Gray, & Liss, 2011a). As more households have had to engage in longer distance, regional-scale travel to meet regular household needs, more residents are

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expressing the desire for compact, self-contained, complete communities which provide the opportunity to engage in a variety of activities locally. If planners are able to

facilitate the creation of such complete communities, benefits may include a greater range of easily accessible opportunities, shorter average vehicular trips, reduced burdens on regional transportation infrastructure, and a potential shift to non-motorized modes (Cervero, 1989). Moreover, creating complete communities is not only an important transportation goal, it may also foster communities with stronger identities and increased social identification from local residents (Kaiser, Godschalk, & Chapin III, 1995). For the purposes of this paper, I define a “complete community” as a sub-regional geographic boundary within which most residents are able to meet most of their daily and weekly nonwork travel demands.

Much of planners’ and planning researchers’ recent focus on “completeness” has been at the neighborhood scale, perhaps due to the influence of New Urbanism on contemporary planning (Duany, Plater-Zyberk, & Speck, 2000). As a result the bulk of recent urban form and travel behavior research has focused on the neighborhood scale (Cao, Mokhtarian, & Handy, 2007; Crane & Crepeau, 1998; Fan, Khattak, & Rodriguez, 2011; Handy & Cliffton, 2001; Khattak & Rodriguez, 2005; Levine et al., 2005;

Manaugh, Miranda-Moreno, & El-Geneidy, 2010). Generally these neighborhoods are defined at a small scale, such as a ¼-mile or ½-mile radius (Krizek, 2003) or based upon a 150-meter grid cell and its surroundings (Manaugh et al., 2010) – i.e. typically on the order of 150-500 acres. While diverse, mixed use neighborhoods are a worthy planning goal and are likely helpful in reducing travel demand, available evidence suggests that neighborhood design explains only a small part of household activity patterns (Boarnet &

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Greenwald, 1999; Handy, 1992; Krizek, 2003). For example, in Ewing et al.’s study of mixed use developments, which range in size from 100-400 acres, the average internal trip capture of these developments was just 18%. This means that approximately 82% of travel starting from these locations ventures outside these developments, even within mixed use settings (Ewing et al., 2011). Indeed, most household activity patterns span beyond the neighborhood and are strongly influenced by regional urban form (Ewing & Cervero, 2001). Therefore, there is an urgent need for greater research attention to urban form beyond the neighborhood scale, such as the community scale. One of the goals of this paper is to try to identify a meaningful scale for thinking about communities. Planners have traditionally used the term “community” to identify a scale that is larger than the neighborhood (about 150-500 acres), yet also much smaller than the region (as defined by metropolitan planning organizations, up to millions of acres); for example, Kaiser et al. define the market area of a community shopping center as 3-5 miles in radius or 10-20 minute drive time (Kaiser et al., 1995). However, the term “community” may take on different meanings, shapes, and sizes depending upon the context in which it is used. In other words, although planners and residents may use the term “community” to correspond to a wide range of scales, here I am trying to examine whether or not such “communities” can offer some reasonable version of completeness with respect to residents’ nonwork activities.

Therefore, this study examines various measures of urban form across a range of community scales and tests how these measures relate to completeness with respect to nonwork trips and tours. To operationalize the idea of completeness, I examine internal trip capture and internal tour capture, or the percentage of trips or tours that begin within

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and are contained within a given community’s boundaries. The goal of designing complete communities with respect to nonwork travel is likely to be feasible because nonwork destinations often (but not always) can serve as substitutes for each other.

The sections of the paper proceed as follows. The first section is a literature review of relevant works in the areas of jobs-housing balance, internal trip capture, and the identification of employment centers. The second covers research methods, including the definition of the communities at two distinct scales, definitions of various measures of urban form, a discussion of the dependent variables (internal tour/trip capture), and a review of regression equations used in the analysis. The third section covers the results. And the final section includes a discussion of principal findings, implications for policy, and potential future research directions.