Travel Behavior and Transportation Safety: Exploring Land Use and Infrastructure

Project Description

Traditional road safety paradigms have primarily emphasized modifying road user behavior through the “three E’s”: engineering, education, and enforcement. Within the framework of occupational epidemiology, these strategies can be understood as efforts to control roadway hazards. Yet, a more effective mechanism lies in eliminating hazards altogether. This research investigates the extent to which travel behaviors contribute to hazard elimination and, in turn, influence overall transportation safety outcomes. Specifically, we examine variables such as commute time, mode share, and vehicle miles traveled, as well as secondary factors including fuel prices and vehicle age. By adopting this perspective, our work moves beyond the conventional road safety focus of controlling behaviors on the road and seeks to situate more fundamental travel behavior patterns as central to reducing transportation risk.

After assessing the effectiveness of hazard elimination, we extend our analysis to examine which combinations of land use and infrastructure are most conducive to achieving this outcome. Our investigation may cover multiple spatial levels including the census tract, city, and state levels. However, the diversity of land use and infrastructure contexts within the United States is relatively limited; for instance, 82% of states report commute mode shares by automobile of 90% or higher. To broaden the scope of comparison, we also incorporate international cases that provide greater variation in travel behavior and built environment characteristics.

We then connect these findings to policy implications. Specifically, contemporary road safety frameworks such as Vision Zero and Safe Systems give little explicit attention to the primary variables examined in this study. A key question, therefore, is how these factors might be meaningfully integrated into existing transportation safety paradigms. By emphasizing broader travel behaviors rather than focusing exclusively on road-user behavior, this research advances a more holistic approach to transportation safety.

This project also includes administrative, technology transfer, workforce development, and education expenses that will go toward the administration of CPBS (e.g., the CPBS program manager’s salary, a course buyout for the director, honorariums for CPBS advisory board members) as well as K-12 support (e.g., collaboration with the New Mexico Summer Transportation Institute) and workforce development efforts (e.g., collaboration with the New Mexico Local Technical Assistance Program).