ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces various suburban land use and transportation, and characterizes the various suburban employment centers' (SECs) case sites from across the United States. Summary statistics are interwoven into the more general discussion of land use planning principles for SECs. The chapter describes the land use in terms of: size and scale; composition of land uses; land and employment densities; housing, retail, and other tenant-support provisions; site organization; lotting practices; land ownership; and SEC evolution. The variety of land uses can have a profound influence on the travel choices of suburban workers. In many single-use environments, such as business parks with exclusively office functions, an automobile becomes almost indispensable for circulating within a project and accessing restaurants, banks, and other consumer services that are off site. The chapter summarizes the characteristics of the journey-to-work trips of the employees of surveyed SECs as well as areawide traffic conditions on facilities serving SECs.