Current trends in transportation and urban planning are moving in the direction of integrated land use and transportation models. These models require an understanding and accurate representation of the propensity of a location to host an activity, and thus generate a need for travel. Within this necessity to represent activity propensity comes an often-neglected area of human-spatial interaction—the attractiveness of a location. The propensity of an individual to travel to a specific location is highly subjective, and can vary from person to person and develop with exposure to the location, an attribute, which is said to be experiential in nature. This experiential aspect of place has been termed by those in geography and environmental psychology as “sense of place”. An intercept survey was thus designed to attempt to measure this sense of place and gain an understanding of how this experiential aspect of place differs among people and between locations. A series of statistical analyses of the data explore differences that exist in sense of place attitudes, as well as impacts of sense of place on travel behavior. Lastly, extensions of this pilot research project are described and future applications are discussed.

Researchers in travel behavior have explored attitudes as important determinants since the 1980s. However, with recent increased frequency, researchers are broadening the use of attitudinal data in models to explain behavior. Much of the application however has focused on attitudes about entities such as lifestyles and attributes of different transport modes. Little focus has been placed on attitudes related to places and attributes of human- place interaction. Much theorizing has taken place in the past forty years focusing on this human-place interaction, which has been formalized into the theory of sense of place. This paper discusses the quantification of this theory, and the implementation of this attitudinal information into travel behavior modeling. To do this a survey was conducted in Santa Barbara, California to measure sense of place and and estimate model of travel behavior. Patrons of two outdoor shopping malls in Santa Barbara were questioned about place attitudes, socio-demographic information and details regarding their activity and travel of the day. Alternate regression model specifications are employed here to examine differences between the two study locations, the use of mode for arrival, and the timing of the activity pointing out the value of the sense of place construct as a determinant of travel behavior.