| Household relocation decision has been a popular research topic in the field of transportation planning. The thesis has two major contributions: first, quantify the relationship between household relocation decisions and the potential affecting factors such as household characteristics, travel behavior and the built environment attributes by using discrete choice theory; second, assess the impact of key affecting attributes for the purposes of transportation planning and policy making.;The case study uses the Household Activity Survey data collected by the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) in the Seattle metropolitan area in 2006. We developed binary logit models to quantify the probability for a household to relocate which is affected by the household's characteristics, travel behavior and the built environment attributes. The modeling results indicate that household characteristics, such as whether there are children in a household and the household income, play important roles in affecting the relocation decision. In addition, travel related attributes, such as the average distance of trips made by a household, would also affect the likelihood of relocating. Moreover, some built environment attributes, which defines the neighborhood of the previous housing location such as the density of housing unit in the related census tract, would also affect relocation decisions. The method and findings of the research could be used to predict relocation decisions of individual households and thus be employed for the purposes of travel demand forecasting and transportation planning. |
