I n most planning programs, "methods" mean statistics. I n a 1 983 survey of 71 North American planning schools, E.H. Baxter found that statistics, chiefly inferential statistics, formed the core component of first-year planning methods classes in almost all of the planning pro­ grams surveyed ( 1 983). What explains this popularity? Statistics, I sus­ pect, has much the same appeal as a succesfs ul political candidate - although exciting to only a few, it is nontheless acceptable to many.

Although land use planning and urban design are increasingly touted as powerful tools for influencing transportation behavior, only modest empirical evidence for this relationship exists. Here, the results from a two-day activity diary are combined with innovative GIS-based measures of urban form and land use pattern to statistically test potential influences on non-commute home-based mode choice. Local measurement at multiple scales is promoted as a realistic means of quantifying an individual’s perception of the neighboring urban environment, and multinomial logit models are specified for various trip purposes. In all models tested, the inclusion of measures of urban form or land use pattern improves the model. Generally, the measurable role of physical factors is small; however, their influence is relatively large in a model predicting station access mode choice.

Over seven weeks in the East Bay Business Times, the Work Force Housing Committee, sponsored by the Business Times, published its recommendations for alleviating the East Bay’s shortage of affordable housing. The committee’s members included many of the Bay Area’s top experts on housing policy. In the final installment of the series on March 5, 2004, the committee summarized its findings in 10 key recommendations. The committee determined that these steps would do the most to eliminate obstacles to the construction of affordable housing in the East Bay and throughout California. Also included in the report are the committee’s weekly commentaries exploring the origins and potential solutions to the housing affordability crisis.