This study confirmed the general belief of urban planners that mixed land use promotes walking in Seoul, a metropolis in East Asia, by analyzing the effect of mixed land use on the travel mode choice of housewives and unemployed people who make non-commuting trips on weekdays. Using binomial logistic regression of commuting data, it was found that the more mixed a neighborhood environment’s uses are, the more the pedestrians prefer to walk rather than drive. The nonlinear relationship between the land use mix index and the choice to walk was also confirmed. Although mixed land use in neighborhoods increased the probability of residents choosing walking over using cars, when the degree of complexity increased above a certain level, the opposite effect was observed. As the density of commercial areas increased, the probability of selecting walking increased. In addition to locational characteristics, income and housing type were also major factors affecting the choice to walk; i.e., when the residents’ neighborhood environment was controlled for higher income and living in an apartment rather than multi-family or single-family housing, they were more likely to choose driving over walking.

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Similar stores, when clustered in urban locations, often close down; many scholars have explained this phenomenon using Hotelling’s theory. However, empirically, several studies have found that competition between rivals causes stores to move away from each other, exhibiting a repulsive force. By contrast, other studies insist that customers strongly drive the agglomeration of retail rivals. This study chooses convenience stores as an experimental subject to investigate why similar shops cluster in an area and to assess the results of increasing levels of competition. By combining various types of big-data sources including convenience stores’ revenues, diverse consumer factors, and built environments, this study found that retail shops cluster to earn revenue by exploiting the consumer purchasing capacity in an area. This benefit, however, disappears when the competition increases beyond a certain threshold. By controlling for the numbers of pedestrians, residents, and employees, this study is the first to explain why similar shops cluster in urban districts and to show the limitations of retail rivals’ clustering.

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