Anecdotal accounts and media stories about poor birth outcomes following a
major disaster have as yet not been verified in an academic context, especially
for the United States. If this relationship is true, the implications are that a
population already disproportionately affected by a disaster might continue
to suffer for literally years to come. The potential for this disproportionate
disaster legacy is no better illustrated than in the landscapes of post
Hurricane Katrina and Rita in Louisiana. In order to gain insight into whether
such a problem may exist for Louisiana, and by extension...

Although relationship between land use and travel behavior was given more than scant attention in the past, urban planners are far from a solution to reduce travel by car. Studies of this kind were often aggregate and did not allow for making inferences of individual-level travel behavior. Using disaggregate data from the Baton Rouge Personal Transportation Survey, this study attempts to overcome this limitation. Several approaches were applied to relate urban land use and travel behavior. First, a multilevel modeling approach was used to investigate the geographical effect of a place and the...