Towards Sustainable Urban Spatial Structure: Does Decentralization Reduce Commuting Times?

This paper contributes to the existing debate on the co-location hypothesis, by devising a proximity measure and controlling for a set of other urban form measures. Utilizing the LEHD (Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics) Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) data that provide the number of jobs by a finer geography, this paper measured the degree of centralization, proximity, and job-housing mismatch. Multiple regression analysis revealed that the job-worker proximity leads to a shorter commuting time. In addition, the results focusing on suburban areas revealed that the impact of the job-worker imbalance and the impact of job-worker mismatch on the commuting time are greater in the suburb in comparison with the city center.