ABSTRACT
Repetitive travel, including work, shopping, recreational and social trips, is a central theoretical concern in urban and economic geography. Predictive models of travel are also among geography's most distinctive and analytically sophisticated contributions to urban and regional planning. 1 In the pluralistic geography of 1980, there is no consensus that positive, 'objective' description and explanation of such travel should be a principal end or goal of geographic inquiry. Humanists, phenomenologists and others concede the role of repetitive travel in molding perceptions, values and meanings, but demur from the objective, aggregative and mathematical language in which most travel literature is phrased. 2 Radicals, and others who want geography to inform change, question the values concealed in current work, 3 and would regard its products merely as a point of departure for identification and diagnosis of the inequities in opportunities, access and cost that have been well confirmed in the study of urban travel. 4 Notwithstanding these views, the explanation of repetitive travel as conventionally defined remains a principal test of the success of the cognitive-behavioral paradigm in geography. Cognitive-behavioral approaches must produce accounts of travel that are incisive and also distinctive, in that they rest on specifically cognitive or behavioral assumptions. That the paradigm should be judged in these terms is implied by the theoretical and applied contexts from which it emerged, by programmatic statements of its practitioners, and by the views of unsympathetic critics.
