Residential choice location, gender and the commute trip to work in Tel Aviv
Introduction
This work investigates various factors influencing individual’s choice of residence location with emphasis on the importance of the commute distance on that decision and tries to identify gender and socio-economic differences regarding their influence.
Residential choice location is influenced by many variables including socio-economic characteristics, life cycle, location of work and other major activities such as schools, shopping, family and friend, real estate values, and characteristics of the residential and workplace area. Some people may choose their work location based on their residential locations while others may choose their residential location given their work location, or some may make these choices simultaneously. In any case, the commute trips that people make daily affect residential location choice and at the same time are derived from this location. Living close to the workplace reduces vehicle kilometer of travel and thus contribute to a more sustainable transportation system.
In choosing residential location, according to economic theory individuals try to maximize their utility from their residential unit, area location characteristics, distances to various desired activity locations considering budget and other constraints. This paper focuses on identification and evaluation of the principal factors influencing this decision using the Israeli Census data for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. The relative importance of these factors is investigated, with emphasis on the role of the commute distance and how it varies by gender and socio-economic status.
In general, four principal groups of factors influence decisions of residence location and are examined in this work:
- (A)
Dwelling unit characteristics – size, design, parking, noise levels, view, age of building, type of dwelling (house/condo/apartment) and other specific characteristics that may vary among individuals.
- (B)
Location characteristics – factors relating to the quality of the residential unit itself and the immediate environment belonging to this group. The immediate environment affects the quality of residence and household’s way of life. Examples for such factors are socio-economic status of the area, quality of education and safety, shopping and leisure opportunities, traffic, noise and air pollution.
- (C)
Accessibility characteristics – access from the area to various urban functions and activities that the individual needs or wants to participate in including work, shopping and leisure. The trip to work, unlike trips for most purposes, is undertaken daily; therefore, it is hypothesized that it has more significant influence on residential choice than other trips.
- (D)
The individual’s characteristics – socio-economic variables like life cycle stage (marital status, children, etc.) education, and income.
Residential location choice is a household decision, however for simplicity and to study the relations between the commute distance (or time) and the individual’s gender as well as other attributes, this work is based on individual’s choice of residence location. The analysis includes both descriptive statistics and logit models of residential choices. This is the first work investigating residential choice estimation in Israel with a unique data set that enable inclusion of a variety of variables.
Section snippets
Literature review
There is a substantial and rich body of literature related to household residential choice. We focus in this review on the studies using discrete choice formulation that is used in our study as well. This formulation is based on microeconomic random utility theory and models the residential location choice decisions as a trade-off among various location attributes such as commute time, housing costs, and accessibility to participation in activities. This approach also allows the sensitivity of
Research objective
The main objective of this research is to identify major factors affecting residential choice and the importance of accessibility consideration in residential choice, and how they differ among genders.
The analysis is based on the Israel Census data conducted in 1995 consisting of a representative sample of 20% of all households of all religious groups in Israel. However, as this research is focused on workers in the main metropolitan area of Tel Aviv, these are mostly from the Jewish
Descriptive data analysis
This section presents a descriptive analysis of the data set investigating differences in commute characteristics among different groups of the population with emphasis on differences among men and women. Table 2 shows the mode of travel to work by men and women for the total number of complete observations in the data set.
It may be seen from Table 2 that the three principal means of travel to work are car driver, bus with no transfer and walk. Driving is the dominant mode for both men and
Residential choice model estimation results
Many models were estimated trying different variables and segmentation of the population. Due to space limitation we present here only the best model obtained. Table 3 shows the estimated coefficient, their t-statistics, and the likelihood results of this best residential logit choice model. The overall model fit is significant at the 1% confident level according to the chi-square test and shows good explanatory power of the variables.
As can be seen from Table 3, distance was segmented by both
Conclusions
This work is essentially an attempt to understand the effect of different factors and characteristics that influence the individual in choosing a place of residence with emphasis on the effect of the commute distance and gender. The investigation was conducted through a comprehensive analysis of geographic, transportation, and personal statistics, principally with the aid of the logit model.
The main findings and conclusions can be summarized as follows:
- 1.
Area characteristics influence the
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