Helena Titheridge

Mapping accessibility differences for the whole journey and for socially excluded groups of people

Abstract Please click here to download the map associated with this article. Accessibility measures and maps are useful in helping to identify social groups and locations with poor levels of access to services and facilities. These measures however fail to directly account for differences in physical capabilities and mobility levels of different social groups of people. Also, many of the access issues for the excluded groups of people such as the elderly are micro level such as the obstructions in pavements, while accessibility measures tend to be at macro level and do not include the whole journey. To help do this a GIS-based tool, AMELIA, has been developed. This paper discusses the specific elements of accessibility incorporated in AMELIA such as the modelling of walk and public transport accessibility, the micro level data required, the capabilities of the different social groups considered and how these affect the accessibility measures. Public transport accessibility maps produced for the elderly people are compared to those of the younger people using St Albans in Hertfordshire, UK, as a case study area.

Enabling low‐carbon living in new UK housing developments

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a tool (the Climate Challenge Tool) that allows house builders to calculate whole life carbon equivalent emissions and costs of various carbon and energy reduction options that can be incorporated into the design of new developments.Design/methodology/approach – The tool covers technical and soft (or lifestyle) measures for reducing carbon production and energy use. Energy used within the home, energy embodied in the building materials, and emissions generated through transport, food consumption and waste treatment are taken into account. The tool has been used to assess the potential and cost‐effectiveness of various carbon reduction options for a proposed new housing development in Cambridgeshire. These are compared with carbon emissions from a typical UK household.Findings – The tool demonstrated that carbon emission reductions can be achieved at much lower costs through an approach which enables sustainable lifestyles than through an approach which fo...

Capitalization Effects of Rail Transit and Bus Rapid Transit on Residential Property Values in a Booming Economy: Evidence from Beijing

This research investigated the capitalization effects of proximity to rail transit and bus rapid transit (BRT) in fast-growing Beijing. Few related studies have been conducted for Chinese cities because the real estate market has only recently been established. Data were collected on apartment homes sold in the Beijing metropolitan area during 2011, and hedonic price modeling was employed to gauge the price premiums or discounts associated with proximity to transit stations. Overall, the authors identified an average price premium of around 5% for properties near rail transit stations, but no statistically significant effects were detected at BRT station areas. Moreover, the authors found that station proximity effects increased both in magnitude and spatial extent at stations located farther from the city center and those surrounded by low- and middle-income neighborhoods. For example, the price premium was as high as 10% in some suburban and low-income areas. The conclusion drawn was that rail transit investment was an effective strategy for Beijing to reshape its urban spatial structure, and local governments in China might consider a rail and property development model as a financing solution for rail transit investment. This study contributes to the evidence of capitalization effects of public transit from a booming and transitional economy.

Vehicle mass and injury risk in two-car crashes: A novel methodology

This paper introduces a novel methodology based on disaggregate analysis of two-car crash data to estimate the partial effects of mass, through the velocity change, on absolute driver injury risk in each of the vehicles involved in the crash when absolute injury risk is defined as the probability of injury when the vehicle is involved in a two-car crash. The novel aspect of the introduced methodology is in providing a solution to the issue of lack of data on the speed of vehicles prior to the crash, which is required to calculate the velocity change, as well as a solution to the issue of lack of information on non-injury two-car crashes in national accident data. These issues have often led to focussing on relative measures of injury risk that are not independent of risk in the colliding cars. Furthermore, the introduced methodology is used to investigate whether there is any effect of vehicle size above and beyond that of mass ratio, and whether there are any effects associated with the gender and age of the drivers. The methodology was used to analyse two-car crashes to investigate the partial effects of vehicle mass and size on absolute driver injury risk. The results confirmed that in a two-car collision, vehicle mass has a protective effect on its own driver injury risk and an aggressive effect on the driver injury risk of the colliding vehicle. The results also confirmed that there is a protective effect of vehicle size above and beyond that of vehicle mass for frontal and front to side collisions.

Private needs, public responses: vulnerable people’s flood-disrupted mobility

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of vulnerable people during flood events, impacts of changes in mobility on well-being and the extent to which frontline services, emergency planning officers and other service providers allocate resources for vulnerable members of the community to meet the challenges posed by floods. Design/methodology/approach – In-depth qualitative interviews carried out with 15 vulnerable residents, seven community representatives and eight service providers. Findings – Vulnerable people’s well-being was negatively affected by the disruption to travel caused by floods, though support from the community to some extent redressed these negative feelings. Whilst there seems to be a strong response from both the community and the local authorities to the mobility needs of vulnerable people during floods, what seems to be missing is an equal response from the private sector in terms of provision of transport services to access goods such as food and money. Pr...

Enabling Low Carbon Living in New Housing Developments – A Triple Bottom Line Analysis

Current approaches to the design and planning of new housing developments in the UK do not sufficiently contribute to the necessary carbon emission reductions that will be required to meet UK Government targets and to avoid dangerous climate change. A tool (the Climate Challenge Tool) has been developed, which allows house builders to calculate whole life carbon equivalent emissions and costs of various carbon and energy reduction options for new developments. These cover technical and soft measures; energy used within the home, energy embodied in the building materials and emissions from transport, food and waste treatment. The tool has been used to assess the potential of various carbon reduction options for a proposed new housing development in Cambridgeshire. It was found that carbon reductions can be achieved at much lower costs through an approach which enables sustainable lifestyles rather than one which purely focuses on reducing heat lost through the fabric of the building and improving the heating and lighting systems. Furthermore a triple-bottom line analysis shows additional social and economic benefits from many of the measures.

CityNet - Deep Learning Tools for Urban Ecoacoustic Assessment

Cities support unique and valuable ecological communities, but understanding urban wildlife is limited due to the difficulties of assessing biodiversity. Ecoacoustic surveying is a useful way of assessing habitats, where biotic sound measured from audio recordings is used as a proxy for biodiversity. However, existing algorithms for measuring biotic sound have been shown to be biased by non-biotic sounds in recordings, typical of urban environments. We develop CityNet, a deep learning system using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), to measure audible biotic (CityBioNet) and anthropogenic (CityAnthroNet) acoustic activity in cities. The CNNs were trained on a large dataset of annotated audio recordings collected across Greater London, UK. Using a held-out test dataset, we compare the precision and recall of CityBioNet and CityAnthroNet separately to the best available alternative algorithms: four acoustic indices (AIs): Acoustic Complexity Index, Acoustic Diversity Index, Bioacoustic Index, and Normalised Difference Soundscape Index, and a state-of-the-art bird call detection CNN (bulbul). We also compare the effect of non-biotic sounds on the predictions of CityBioNet and bulbul. Finally we apply CityNet to describe acoustic patterns of the urban soundscape in two sites along an urbanisation gradient. CityBioNet was the best performing algorithm for measuring biotic activity in terms of precision and recall, followed by bulbul, while the AIs performed worst. CityAnthroNet outperformed the Normalised Difference Soundscape Index, but by a smaller margin than CityBioNet achieved against the competing algorithms. The CityBioNet predictions were impacted by mechanical sounds, whereas air traffic and wind sounds influenced the bulbul predictions. Across an urbanisation gradient, we show that CityNet produced realistic daily patterns of biotic and anthropogenic acoustic activity from real-world urban audio data. Using CityNet, it is possible to automatically measure biotic and anthropogenic acoustic activity in cities from audio recordings. If embedded within an autonomous sensing system, CityNet could produce environmental data for cites at large-scales and facilitate investigation of the impacts of anthropogenic activities on wildlife. The algorithms, code and pre-trained models are made freely available in combination with two expert-annotated urban audio datasets to facilitate automated environmental surveillance in cities.

Universities’ Transport Studies Group UK Annual Conference 2009

This special issue presents a set of papers that showcases the depth and range of academic research currently being undertaken in the UK under the auspices of the Universities’ Transport Study Group (UTSG). The UTSG ‘initiated by the late Professor R.J. Smeed of University College London in 1967, aims to promote transport teaching and research and to act as a focus for those involved in these activities in universities and institutions of higher education in the UK and Ireland’ (www.utsg.net). A conference for both academic staff and researchers of member institutions is held annually, ‘designed to discuss research needs, research in progress and to give research students the opportunity to present papers on their work’ (www.utsg.net). The 41st Annual UTSG Conference was held in January 2009 hosted by University College London’s Centre for Transport Studies. One hundred and twenty delegates from the UK academic transport community attended the conference and those who presented were invited to have their papers considered for inclusion in this special issue. From those that responded a number of papers were carefully selected by the special issue editors and were subsequently subject to rigorous peer review in the usual manner. This special issue is the culmination of that process comprising seven papers which seek to showcase the research activity of the UTSG as presented at the 2009 Annual Conference. The papers reveal a breadth of research interest and expertise, in terms of activity, mode and type of method utilised. The papers also reveal the multidisciplinary nature of the UK transport academic community. With respect to the seven papers included in this special issue, the paper by Goodwin and Lyons is based on a review of public attitudes to aspects of transport of significant policy importance. The focus of the paper is on selected themes from an evidence-based review of over 300 studies. The paper by Susilo and Dijst investigates the influence that socio-demographics, journey patterns and the built environment have on the ratio of travel time and activity duration that an individual spends when engaging in work, daily and non-daily shopping and sport and recreational activities. The paper by Merkert, Smith and Nash concerns the benchmarking of train operating firms incorporating measures of transactions costs into a two-stage bootstrapped data envelopment analysis based on a sample of Swedish, German and British train operators. The paper by Blainey and Preston continues the rail theme, developing a direct demand model based on ticket sales data for 85 local rail stations in South Wales. This paper was awarded the Smeed Prize for the best research student paper presented at the annual conference. With respect to road transport, the paper by Heslop, Harvey, Thorp and Mulley explores the factors that underly driver boredom, investigating age and gender differences in the experience of that driver boredom. It also examines preferred