The ability to travel is essential for people to participate in society, acquire resources and services, and engage in daily life. Trips for personal service and leisure constitute a significant share of total travel, more than one-third of all trips, but the distinct patterns of these journeys have often been overlooked in the existing literature. Also, daily travel in high-poverty, declining urban neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment is less studied and is not well understood. Focusing on the city of Detroit and its suburbs, this dissertation examines daily travel patterns – the one-way trip distance (length of journey to the destination), weekly trip frequency and total distance traveled, and mode of travel – for personal services and leisure activities, and how they vary by individual sociodemographic characteristics and different neighborhood environments. The results show that personal service and leisure travel have distinct patterns in terms of trip distance and mode selection. Also, the effects of the neighborhood environment and individual sociodemographic characteristics on travel vary significantly by the purpose of the journey (personal service versus leisure). In particular, the effect of aging varies by neighborhood context and trip purpose. Seniors in declining urban neighborhoods have significantly fewer leisure trips, indicating challenges they face in leisure activity participation. Moreover, the typical association of high-density built environments and shorter trip distances do not hold in the declining urban Detroit neighborhoods. In fact, residents in such neighborhoods experience unique burdens in travel and have to travel longer distances to reach amenities despite living in a high-density built environment, due to the extreme disinvestment within the city of Detroit. Lastly, focusing on an essential type of personal services – pharmacies, it is shown that residents in declining urban neighborhoods actually bypass local independent stores within the neighborhood and travel longer distance to shop at more distant national chain pharmacies.
Read
