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.

In recent years, a debate has brewed over whether the decentralization of employment has been beneficial from a regional standpoint. In this article, we focus on one aspect of the debate: how the relocation of office workers from a downtown to a suburban location affects commuting behavior. From a survey of 320 former downtown San Francisco workers who now work in the suburbs, we found that the average distance traveled remains essentially unchanged and that the average commuting speed declines. The most dramatic change is the switch from public transit to private auto commuting. In the aggregate, we estimate that the change in job location is associated with nearly a threefold increase in vehicle miles traveled to work. While from a personal standpoint, employees seem be to better off since they get to work faster in a superior form of transportation, from a larger social and environment perspective, the costs could be significant. More detailed analyses of submarkets reveal that the transportation impacts vary considerably depending on whether the original residence was in the suburbs or central city and whether relocated workers have moved their residences in recent years. In general, those who remain in San Francisco and become reverse commuters are worst off whereas those who move their residences out of the city are much better off in terms of transportation access. The research also shows that, consistent with theory, movers tend to trade-off larger lot living for a longer commute, even when jobs suburbanize. The article concludes that various users chargers, development fees, and transit service reforms are needed to respond to the rapid growth in suburban employment markets.