Application of the dynamic spatial ordered probit model:

The evolution of land development in urban area has been of great interest to policy-makers and planners. Due to the complexity of the land development process, no existing studies are considered sophisticated enough. This research uses the dynamic spatial ordered probit (DSOP) model to analyse Austin's land use intensity patterns over a 4-point panel. The observational units are 300 m × 300 m grid cells derived from satellite images. The sample contains 2,771 such grid cells, spread among 57 zip code regions. The marginal effects of control variables suggest that increases in travel times to central business district (CBD) substantially reduce land development intensity. More important, temporal and spatial autocorrelation effects are significantly positive, showing the superiority of the DSOP model. The derived parameters are used to predict future land development patterns, along with associated uncertainty in each grid cell's prediction. Copyright (c) 2009 the author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2009 RSAI.