Zachary Patterson

Build It. But Where? The Use of Geographic Information Systems in Identifying Locations for New Cycling Infrastructure

ABSTRACT Concern over climate change, traffic congestion, and the health consequences of sedentary lifestyles has resulted in a surge of interest in cycling as an efficient form of sustainable transportation. In order to best serve the needs of current cyclists and attract future ones, methodologies are needed to objectively determine the optimum location of new cycling facilities. This article uses Montréal, Canada, as a case study to demonstrate various methods for locating facilities. This research can be beneficial to transportation engineers and planners since it uses readily available data sources to recommend additions and improvements to a citys cycling infrastructure.

Shipper Preferences Suggest Strong Mistrust of Rail: Results from Stated Preference Carrier Choice Survey for Quebec City-Windsor Corridor in Canada

The Quebec City–Windsor corridor is the busiest and most important trade and transportation corridor in Canada. The transportation sector is the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Governments around the world, including Canadas, are considering increasing mode share by rail as a way of reducing transportation emissions. To understand whether freight mode shift is a realistic means of reducing transportation emissions, an analytical model is needed that can predict the effect of government policy on mode split. This paper presents the findings of the first such model developed for the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor. The model itself is a stated preference carrier choice model of shippers in this busy route. The model was developed by using the results of a stated preference survey undertaken in fall 2005. The survey was designed explicitly to evaluate shipper preferences for the carriage of intercity consignments, particularly their preferences for carriers that contract the services of rail companies to carry these shipments via rail. The results of the study (a) show that shippers are mistrustful of using rail to move their consignments and (b) suggest that increasing rails share of freight transport faces tremendous challenges.

Urban rapid rail transit and gentrification in Canadian urban centres: A survival analysis approach

Despite the existing knowledge that urban rapid rail transit has many effects on surrounding areas, and despite some attempts to understand the links between transit and gentrification, there remain methodological gaps in the research. This study addresses the relationship between the implementation of urban rapid rail transit and gentrification, which is conceived of as an event. As such, an event analysis approach using ‘survival analysis’ is adopted as the statistical analytical tool. It tests whether proximity to rail transit is related to the onset of gentrification in census tracts in Canada’s largest cities. It is found that proximity to rail transit, and to other gentrifying census tracts, have a statistically significant effect on gentrification in two of the three cities analysed. By providing a methodological framework for the empirical analysis of the impact of urban rail transit on gentrification, this paper is a reference for both researchers and transportation planners.

Potential Path Areas and Activity Spaces in Application: A Review

Abstract The potential path area (PPA) and activity space (AS) concepts play a central role in the substantial amount of applied research focusing on the quantitative analysis and description of peoples spatial behaviour. Given this large literature, and the surprising lack of a formal review of the research, the time is ripe for a systematic review. This paper examines how the key concepts of PPAs and ASs have evolved, how they have been applied, what issues need to be resolved, and potential areas for future research. The review begins with the main theoretical developments influencing the applied use of these methods, and continues with a categorization of the literature across three dimensions — research domain, methods of calculation and application purpose. We find that the methods have been used not only in the core originating fields of travel behaviour and transport geography, but also in health, criminology and demography, and are growing fastest in health. The methods have been applied to a number of purposes with applications to accessibility the most common and the fastest growing. Demonstrated interest in these methods, along with the technologies and data to facilitate them, suggests a bright future for the use of PPAs and ASs in the social sciences.

Pedestrian preferences with respect to roundabouts--a video-based stated preference survey

Research on user behavior and preferences has been a helpful tool in improving road safety and accident prevention in recent years. At the same time, there remain some important areas of road safety and accident prevention for which user preferences, despite their importance, have not been explored. Most road safety research has not explicitly addressed vulnerable user (pedestrians and cyclists) preferences with respect to roundabouts, despite their increasing construction around the world. The present research stems from the fact that studies related to roundabout safety have generally focused on drivers, while overlooking the importance of safety as it relates to vulnerable users, especially pedestrians. Moreover, it handles this particular issue through an approach that has not been used so far in this context; the Stated Preference (SP) survey. As such, there are two main goals (and contributions) of this work. First, to show how SP surveys can be used to investigate the importance of different design and operational features to pedestrian perceptions of safety in roundabouts. This allows us, for example, to quantify how some features of roundabouts (e.g. high traffic volume) can be compensated for by design features such as pedestrian islands. This is useful in helping to design roundabouts that pedestrians prefer and will hopefully use, to help encourage active transport. Second, to demonstrate how traffic simulation software can be successfully used to include difficult-to-communicate attributes in SP surveys.

Modeling the effect of land use on activity spaces

Historically, research that has analyzed the effect of land use on travel demand has concentrated on a few key indicators, notably, mode choice, vehicle miles traveled, and number of trips. This literature has focused primarily on the effects of individual land use variables; for example, what is the effect of land use mix or population density on mode choice? It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the isolated impact of particular measures of land use on individual and household transportation behavior is small, but when these measures are dealt with by using a clustered approach, their combined influence becomes less ambiguous in direction and greater in magnitude. This paper contributes to the transportation and land use literature by examining the effect of clusters of land use indicators on activity spaces, an emerging but traditionally ignored indicator of transportation behavior. Regression analysis results point to a significant relationship between large and dispersed activity spaces, low levels of population and employment density, and low levels of public transit accessibility and land use mix.

Driving to Suburban Rail Stations: Understanding Variables That Affect Driving Distance and Station Demand

Current research focuses on pedestrian access to transit; however, commuter trains in outlying urban regions serve populations in low-density areas where many people drive rather than walk to transit services. The determinants that influence how far people are willing to drive to train stations and the factors that determine boardings at suburban train stations have not been formally studied. This paper models suburban commuter travel demand by use of the 2003 Montreal, Quebec, Canada, origin–destination survey and onboard survey data from the Agence Métropolitaine de Transport to identify characteristics of individual trips and station characteristics that influence the driving distance to commuter rail and demand at stations. The models show that methods for estimating pedestrian access distance and number of boardings per transit stop can easily be transferred to estimating driving access distance and the number of boardings per station in the park-and-ride context. The model for passenger boardings by station can be used for estimating either demand for a planned station or the effect of service interventions (e.g., parking spots) on boardings at existing stations. The paper also shows that these approaches can be a valuable tool to transit planners interested in increasing passenger demand on commuter rail through a better understanding of service characteristics.

DataMobile: Smartphone Travel Survey Experiment

An experiment that used an application of a pragmatic smartphone travel survey developed to minimize respondent burden while collecting primarily passive data between destinations is described; invited participants came from known population, Concordia University. Respondent burden was reduced by optimizing battery usage, requiring little from respondents apart from downloading and installing an app, completing a short survey, and allowing the app to run in their smartphones’ background. The experiment showed that a surprisingly large number of people (892) contacted by e-mail were willing to participate in the study, with a resultant surprisingly large amount of data as well (4,154 respondent days). Moreover, the overall age distribution of the sample was found to be closer to the true population than a traditional origin–destination (O-D) survey capturing the same population. Differences in travel behavior results from the O-D survey appear plausible given what is known about both smartphone and traditional surveys. That respondents were not asked to validate their data reduced respondent burden, but some validated data are necessary to derive meaningful information from collected data. The collection of some less accurate data when GPS is not available is an important avenue to reduce the identification of missing trips. The authors view this experiment as a data point, among others, in attempts to understand the trade-offs involved in the development of smartphone applications. The authors hope it will contribute to the use of such applications on a larger scale in data collection initiatives.

Mapping the Jitney Network with Smartphones in Accra, Ghana: The AccraMobile Experiment

A data collection exercise is presented that was conducted by the Department of Transport of the Metropolitan Assembly of Accra, Ghana, to further its knowledge of transportation services placed under its jurisdiction. In order to map the city’s transportation network, a partnership was developed between local authorities and a Canadian university with the support of the French bilateral development agency. An innovative methodology based on the use of smartphones and digital technologies allowed the project team to collect and map 315 jitney routes in less than 2 months. Collectors equipped with GPS-enabled smartphones surveyed Accra’s formal jitney network in its entirety and transmitted data daily to a team overseas in charge of mapping and analysis. The first map of the city’s transportation network is presented here and preliminary conclusions are drawn from it. By mapping passengers’ boarding and alighting, this study also offers unique insights into the spatial distribution of the demand for transportation in Accra. This research opens both methodological and operational perspectives. It contributes to a growing body of literature on jitneys and transportation planning in developing countries. It also demonstrates that transportation data can be collected with limited time and resources through the use of mobile technologies. From a practical point of view, these data will assist the authorities in regulating, planning, and developing Accra’s transportation network.

A Spatial and Temporal Comparative Analysis of the Effects of Land-Use Clusters on Activity Spaces in Three Quebec Cities

Previous literature on transportation and land use has focused on the effect of individual land-use variables, such as population and employment density, and on measures of transportation demand, such as vehicle kilometers traveled and mode split. In contrast, our work uses activity spaces, a relatively unexplored measure of travel dispersal, as a dependent variable and neighborhood clusters to capture the effect of land use on this variable. This paper is an extension of previous research that dealt with Montreal exclusively and similar methods are used to compare three cities (Montreal, Quebec City, and Sherbrooke) over multiple years (1998–2008). We control and tests for the possibility of residential location self-selection bias through simultaneous equation modeling. The main findings are that (i) activity spaces are clearly linked to land use (through neighborhood clusters), as well as to overall city size; (ii) activity spaces appear to be growing over time where employment centers are fixed; and (iii) exogeneity in explanatory variables cannot be rejected.