New urban and standard suburban designs and policy preferences

New urbanists attempt to foster community and protect the environment by promoting designs that increase density, facilitate neighborhood interactions, reduce automobile dependency, and increase pedestrian accessibility. In many areas of the country, however, new urban designs are illegal and high density designs are unpopular. New urbanists hope that, through the use of image preference surveys, they can provide enough evidence of the public's desire for their designs that then can provide greater options in denser, more sustainable, and more attractive environments. It is clear from prior image preference survey results that the public does indeed like how new urban designs look, but research on public preferences for urban design policies has been inconclusive, and few have studied the connections between people's visual and policy preferences. This study used data gathered from a 1998 image and policy preference survey completed by 384 anonymous participants. They were asked to assess images and policies that conveyed design aspects such as mixed- and single-use zoning, street width, housing facades, density, and transportation. This study tested whether participants prefer new urban or standard suburban images and policies, and how well participants connect their image preferences to their policy preferences. A comparison of mean scores showed strong preferences for new urban images and policies over their standard suburban counterparts. Despite this pattern, and although one might assume that policies and images would coincide, regression analyses yielded a significant connection between policies and images only in the case of standard suburban preferences; participants did not make significant connections between their preferences for new urban images and new urban policies. More effective and visually-based public education is recommended in order to help the public achieve more concrete understandings of abstract policies so that connections between policies and their visual outcomes can more easily be made.