Abstract. Communities are increasingly looking to land use planning strategies to reduce
drive-alone travel. Many planning efforts aim to develop neighborhoods with higher levels of
accessibility that will allow residents to shop closer to home and drive fewer miles. To better
understand how accessible land use patterns relate to household travel behavior, this paper is
divided into three sections. The first section describes the typical range of services available in
areas with high neighborhood accessibility. It explains how trip-based travel analysis is limited
because it does not consider the linked (chained) nature of most travel. The second section
describes a framework that provides a more behavioral understanding of household travel. This
framework highlights travel tours, the sequence of trips that begin and end at home, as the
basic unit of analysis. The paper offers a typology of travel tours to account for different travel
purposes; by doing so, this typology helps understand tours relative to the range of services
typically offered in accessible neighborhoods. The final section empirically analyzes relationships
between tour type and neighborhood access using detailed travel data from the Central Puget
Sound region (Seattle, Washington). Households living in areas with higher levels of neighborhood
access are found to complete more tours and make fewer stops per tour. They make
more simple tours (out and back) for work and maintenance (personal, appointment, and shopping)
trip purposes but there is no difference in the frequency of other types of tours. While they
travel shorter distances for maintenance-type errands, a large portion of their maintenance
travel is still pursued outside the neighborhood. These findings suggest that while higher levels
of neighborhood access influences travel tours, it does not spur households to complete the
bulk of their errands close to home.