Space, and in particular public space for movement and leisure, is a valuable and scarce resource, especially in today's growing urban centres. The distribution and absolute amount of urban space-especially the provision of sufficient pedestrian areas, such as sidewalks-is considered crucial for shaping living and mobility options as well as transport choices. Ubiquitous urban data collection and today's IT capabilities offer new possibilities for providing a relation-preserving overview and for keeping track of infrastructure changes. This paper presents three novel methods for estimating representative sidewalk widths and applies them to the official Viennese streetscape surface database. The first two methods use individual pedestrian area polygons and their geometrical representations of minimum circumscribing and maximum inscribing circles to derive a representative width of these individual surfaces. The third method utilizes aggregated pedestrian areas within the buffered street axis and results in a representative width for the corresponding road axis segment. Results are displayed as city-wide means in a 500 by 500 m grid and spatial autocorrelation based on Moran's I is studied. We also compare the results between methods as well as to previous research, existing databases and guideline requirements on sidewalk widths. Finally, we discuss possible applications of these methods for monitoring and regression analysis and suggest future methodological improvements for increased accuracy.
The ever-increasing popularity of bike-sharing schemes has added an additional mode to the transport regime in many cities. The data produced by lending and returning bicycles at geographically diverse stations has stimulated numerous studies. We focus on the City of Vienna bike-sharing system (CityBike Wien; CBW) and its relationship with the public transport system, asking whether bike-sharing serves as competitor, relief or supplement. We approach the question by surveying the total CityBike Wien trip data from 2015about 1 million records. We cleanse and route all bicycle trips and compare them with routed alternative public transport (PT) journeys in terms of travel time ratios and detour factors. After calculating and plotting the cumulative frequencies of travel times and distances of both modes of transport as well as comparing the current PT and CBW usage levels, we conclude that CityBike functions as a supplement to Vienna's public transport.
Deriving from extensive analysis of quantitative survey data in Austria, this chapter focuses on the importance that inherited presuppositions play in the processes of planning and implementation. In a majority of European countries, cycling is considered to play a significant role in a sustainable urban transport system, after decades of car dominance captivating the thoughts and actions of decision-makers and thus appears in transport policy documents ranging from local to national level. However, when actual measures are implemented, mental barriers of decision makers surface and this often leads to suboptimal results. Mental barriers are shown most clearly in resistance to innovation adoption, a phenomenon well documented in social science. In this context, the resistance to innovation adoption causes reservations and limiting beliefs that hinder decision-makers in the introduction of suitable solutions for everyday and every-use cycling. The chapter addresses quantitatively two primary questions relating to mental barriers clearly revealed in the analysis of planning processes: of what are mental barriers comprised, and where do they exist? Our quantitative exploration points the way towards two possible approaches to overcome mental barriers: social pressure upon and self-experience by decision-makers.
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