The challenges of land use and transport planning on urban residents’ quality of life: A panel data analysis

Abstract

Residents’ life choices are closely linked with quality of life (QOL), which can be roughly captured from essential life domains such as residence, health, social, education and learning, employment, family life, leisure and recreation, financial as well as travel behavior. Since different life choices are interdependent, land use and transport policies may influence residents’ life aspects and consequentially their QOL. Over time, residents’ life choices may change, particularly in response to life events, such as residential location changes or household structure changes. These changes may have an impact on individuals’ prospective travel needs and activity patterns, such as engagement in social and leisure activities, further potentially changing residents’ QOL as well. Considering that residential choices and travel decisions are part of residents’ life choices, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive and systematic investigation of life choices. Therefore, this study penetrates the concept of other life choices’ changes into the residential choices and travel behavior dynamic modeling, after controlling for the effects of changes in socio-demographics (mainly life events factors) over time. The preliminary study is an estimation of a structural equation model based on panel data. First, from a static viewpoint, the other life choices have a considerable effect on residents’ quality of life compared with the minor effects of residential choices and travel behavior. Second, from a dynamic viewpoint, the current other life choices and past other life choices play a prominent role in the current quality of life achievement, followed by smaller influences of current and past residential choices, key life events, and minor effects of current and past travel behavior. This study confirms the mediating effects of other life choices and suggests that ignoring other life choices relevant to residents’ essential life domains, such as health and leisure, and instead of emphasizing the straightforward impacts of land use and transport policies on QOL may not be effective because residents’ QOL is greatly influenced by other life choices or life event changes.