Activity-related land use mix construct and its connection to pedestrian travel

Integrating a diverse set of land use types within a neighborhood is a central tenet of smart growth policy. Over a generation of urban planning research has heralded the transportation, land use, and public health benefits arising from a balanced supply of local land uses, including the improved feasibility for pedestrian travel. However, land use mixing has largely remained a transportation-land use planning goal without a conceptually valid set of environmental indicators quantifying this multifaceted spatial phenomenon. In this study, we incorporated activity-based transportation planning and landscape ecology theory within a confirmatory factor analysis framework to introduce a land use mix construct indicative of the paired landscape pattern aspects of composition and configuration. We found that our activity-related land use mix measure, and not the commonly adopted entropy-based index, predicted walk mode choice and home-based walk trip frequency when operationalized at three geographic scales.