review

Responds to 100 or more words to following 3 essays separately on (In the Ewing and Cervero studies, pick one of the four major impacts and explain why you think it is important and what you would do to help or improve that area given the chance
  Responses should be a minimum of 100 words and include direct questions.

1. This weeks assignment was a struggle for me. I read the information twice and was still lost in what I was looking for. Finally, through some of you, I finally was able to understand what I was looking for and then able to expand. The “three D’s” that expand to seven D’s all seem to tie together when coming up with developing an effective travel route (Cervero, Ewing, 2010). The one that stuck in my mind, as I had just arrived home for the day, was destination accessibility. This measures the ease of access to get where one needs to go (Cervero, Ewing, 2010). I live in Crestview, FL and it is know as the “Hub City”. When I look at the lay out I cannot imagine how this is an effective hub. The way that the lights are within the city can cause back ups in both directions of the highway impeding on the flow of traffic to destinations. Adding to the difficulty of mobility in the area is the fact that the local base has purchased most of the uninhabited land so the highways cannot expand to ease the flow of traffic.
What I do see is that the city has access to I-10, highway 85 that goes up to Alabama and down to highway 98 on the beaches, and highway 90 that links to some of the smaller towns across the north panhandle. Acknowledging this makes me understand how when it was first developed how the destination accessibility was ideal routing to many locations in a reasonable amount of time with the amount of traffic at the time.

2. Consistent with prior work, we find that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is most strongly related to measures of accessibility to destinations and secondarily to street network design variables (Ewing & Cervero, 2010).
In this article, miles traveled is an important factor when comes to transportation.  Either, you are the customer or the service provider.  This affect how people can charge to move from point A to B. It also affects the life of the vehicle, fuel consumption, and maintenance.  Cities around the world use the same factor to build bus stops, metro location and of course based on the density of one area to another. However, in urban areas, miles travelled doesnt affects the fare.  Some cities allow people to purchase a weekly ticket and travel as many times the want based on the expiration date. 
Miles travelled is critical to suburban areas not so much to urban people because of traffic, destination and proximity.  It might take someone in urban areas longer to travel in a car from one street to another than someone that is walking.  Therefore, urban travelers are more concerned about street, roads and buildings connections design than traveled distance.  Buildings and the environment anesthetics, beauty force people to think about the miles traveled when exploring the city.  On another hand suburban area traveler will be affected by the distance traveled because of lack of accessibility.  When land is properly used, mile traveled is just an option from destination to another because of the accessibility factor. The relation to landmark makes travel or movement easier.

3. Deciding which one of the four major impacts in Ewing and Cervero study I felt was a little difficult due to the fact that from my readying they seem to relate to each other, meaning that you cannot consider one impact without taking into account the others.  There is also research done on whether or not the four major impacts influence travel behavior at all.  While most agree that the built environment influences travel, considerable disagreement exists over the likely travel behavior impacts of increased density, diversity, street connectivity, and design variables (Frank 2000; Ewing and Cervero 2010; Schneider 2011)
With that said I would like to talk about density and why I believe understanding the density of an area is important.  Density in this discussion is the population of an area, and how that population affects modes of travel.  From state, county, city, and so forth population amounts vary.  Knowing the density of an area is important for the reason that it gives designers, developers, and builders an idea of what is needed in that location.  If a city is densely populated then planning should consider what people will need to use for transportation.  Walking and running areas will need to me created, mass transit like buses, subways, and trains will also need to be built.  Some argue that density is related to mode choice when traveling to and from work or shopping trips.  However, Ewing and Cervero (2010) found that population density and job density are only weakly associated with travel behavior. 
Improving density when it comes to local population is a difficult thing.  The only way I can think of to improve the situation is to make more travel options available from mass transit to walking and running areas which may help sustainability of travel.