Residential self-selection in the land use-travel connection: Whose self-selection?

Travel-related attitudes have been found to bias the land use-travel relationship by confounding and moderation effects. While the majority of self-selection studies identified these effects at the individual level, intra-household interactions may also be of importance. Individual's living neighborhood and other travel decisions could be partially determined by attitudes of other family members. This paper investigates the self-selection effects (regarding the residence, workplace and car ownership level) from a household perspective, by incorporating partner's travel-related preferences and travel behavior into the traditional self-selection framework with the structural equation modelling (SEM) approach. Empirical results in Beijing showed that both of partners' travel attitudes matter for household travel-related decisions, husband tends to be more dominant in two location choices, while wife has greater decision power in household daily travels. This paper helps to clarify the intra-household dependencies in travel-related choices, and highlights the value of social interactions in residential self-selection research.