Using GIS to visualise and evaluate student travel behaviour

Abstract

Using GIS to evaluate travel behaviour is an important technique to increase our understanding of the relationship between accessibility and transport demand. In this paper, the activity space concept was used to identify the nature of participation in activities (or lack of it) amongst a group of students using a 2 day travel-activity diary. Three different indicators such as the number of unique locations visited, average daily distance travelled, and average daily activity duration were used to measure the size of activity spaces. These indicators reflect levels of accessibility, personal mobility, and the extent of participation respectively. Multiple regression analyses were used to assess the impacts of students socio-economic status and the spatial characteristics of home location. Although no differences were found in the levels of accessibility and the extent of participation measures, home location with respect to a demand responsive transport (DRT) service was found to be the most important determinant of their mobility patterns. Despite being able to travel longer distances, students who live outside of the DRT service area were found to be temporally excluded from some opportunities. Student activity spaces were also visualised within a GIS environment and a spatial analysis was conducted to underpin the evaluation of the performance of the DRT. This approach was also used to identify the activity spaces of individuals that are geographically excluded from the service. Evaluation of these results indicated that although the service currently covers areas of high demand, 90% of the activity spaces remained un-served by the DRT service. Using this data six new routes were designed to meet the coverage goal of public transport based on a measure of network impedance based on inverse activity density. Following assessment of public transport service coverage, the study was extended using a Spatial Multi Criteria Evaluation (SMCE) technique to assess the effect of service provision on patronage.

Measures of Transport-Related Social Exclusion: A Critical Review of the Literature

“…Traditionally, the measures of deprivation have attempted to identify and assess these attributes [39]. These are often referred to as different dimensions (or domains) of deprivation such as economic, social, political, personal, living space, mobility impairment, and geographical isolation [8,29,[40][41][42][43][44].…”

“…This work has found that the commuting distance is shorter for married women than married men and the mobility is relatively stable over time for married women who are in higher paid jobs (interaction between gender and employment). Kamruzzaman et al [41] have used average daily distance travelled as a measure of student mobility and found that students who live outside of the limits of a demand responsive service have a significantly higher level of mobility (as spatial disaggregation). Therefore, it appears that the operationalised examples of personal mobility-based measures using the concept of activity spaces overcome some of the identified weaknesses of the traditional mobility-based measures such as socioeconomic (e.g., male, female, disabled, and children) disaggregation, and spatio-temporal disaggregation of the availability/use of transport services.…”

“…Becker and Gerike [76] have mentioned that actual accessibility measures, measure the opportunities that are actually reached-in contrast to potential accessibility, which measures the opportunities that could be reached. Different dimensional indicators have been used in the literature to measure participation in activities including count (e.g., number of trips, number of unique activity locations visited) [41,84,146,147], frequency of participation (e.g., number of trips per week or per day) [7,143,148], duration of participation (activity duration) [41,121,148], and types of opportunities participated in [41,148].…”

Multicriteria Analysis of Hungarian Journey Planners

“…It is also beneficial for passengers, if a good visualization of alternative routes is presented. Collecting passengers' routes the operators can derive mobility patterns (Kamruzzaman et al, 2011).…”

Will the application of spatial multi criteria evaluation technique enhance the quality of decision-making to resolve boundary conflicts in the Philippines?

“…Despite intensive application in such different research fields as transport planning, risk analysis, suitability analysis, land use planning, and water management (Ceballos-Silva and Lopez-Blanco, 2003;Dai et al, 2001;Kamruzzaman et al, 2011;Makropoulos and Butler, 2006;Simon et al, 2004;Zucca et al, 2008), the application of the SMCE in resolving boundary conflicts has received little attention in the literature. Sharifi et al (2002) have applied the SMCE to locate a boundary between the Tunari National Park and Cochabamba city in Bolivia.…”