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Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners commonly recommend compact development in part as a way of getting people to drive less, with the idea that less driving will lead to more sustainable communities. Planners base their recommendations on a substantial body of research that examines the impact of compact development on driving. Different studies, however, have found different outcomes: Some studies find that compact development causes people to drive less, while other studies do not. I use meta-regression analysis to a) explain why different studies on driving and compact development yield different results, and b) combine different findings from many studies into reliable statistics that can better inform planning practice. I address the following questions: Does compact development make people drive less, and if so, how much less? I find that compact development does make people drive less, because most of the compact development features I study have a statistically significant negative influence on driving. The impact, however, is fairly small: Compact development features do not appear to have much influence on driving. My findings are limited to some extent because they are derived from small sample sizes. Takeaway for practice: Planners should not rely on compact development as their only strategy for reducing driving unless their goals for reduced driving are very modest and can be achieved at a low cost. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Advanced driving simulators have a potential to be utilized to assess crash risks of driving behaviors, traffic surroundings, and highway designs. This study focused on investigating if drivers' stop/go decisions due to signal change in the simulator's virtual reality can be used to assess rear-end crash risk at the signalized intersection. A signalized intersection with as many important features (including roadway geometries, traffic control devices, intersection surroundings, and buildings) was replicated into a high-fidelity driving simulator. Using the virtual signalized intersection, a driving simulator experiment was conducted to test driver's stop/go decisions at two approaches of the intersection that respectively showed higher and lower rear-end crash risks in the crash history analysis. The experiment results showed that the variability in drivers' stop/go decisions at the higher crash-risk location is higher than that at the lower crash-risk location. Further, through modeling rear-end conflicts based on driver's stop/go probability as a function of potential time to intersection, it was found that the rear-end crash tendency at the two locations displayed by the driver's stop/go behavior in driving simulator is consistent with the finding from the trend in crash history analysis. This research supported that driver's stop/go behavior in a driving simulator can be utilized to assess rear-end crash risk at signalized intersections to seek effective engineering countermeasures to lower crash rates for the high-risk locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]