A Spatially Disaggregated Approach to Commuting Efficiency

During the past two decades, the concept of commuting efficiency has been used to evaluate the relationships between the journey to work and land use at the regional scale. The common approach of calculating regional statistics masks the intraurban variation of commuting efficiency. This paper develops an alternative approach to commuting efficiency and spatial structure assessments based on spatial disaggregation. The extension of existing regional measures by estimating zonal average trip lengths for workers leaving home and employers attracting workers facilitates analysis of intrametropolitan commuting efficiency. Spatially disaggregated metrics are formulated and applied to journey-to-work data for the cities of Warsaw, Poznań, Łódź and Kraków in Poland. At the regional scale, excess commuting varies from 48 per cent (Warsaw) to 67 per cent (Łódź). Intraurban variations in excess commuting indicate that estimates of commuting efficiency are impacted by the jobs-housing balance and are sensitive to locations of zones within the study area.