Browsing by Subject "GPS data, non-work trips, land use, axis of travel, destination choice"

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    Axis of Travel: Modeling non-work destination choice with GPS Data
    (2015) Huang, Arthur; Levinson, David M
    Based on in-vehicle GPS travel data in the Minneapolis - St. Paul Metropolitan Area, this research investigates how land use, road network structure, and route familiarity influence home-based single-destination choice. We propose a new choice set formation approach which combines survival analysis and random selection. Our empirical findings reveal that: (1) Walkable opportunities and diversity of services at the destination influence destination choice. (2) Route-specific network measures such as turn index and speed discontinuity display statistically significant effects on destination choice. (3) The familiarity factors reflected by distance to home, work, and downtown also plays a role. A destination closer to home and work, all else equal, is more likely to be selected. A destination farther away from downtown is more attractive for auto users. This research contributes to methodologies in modeling destination choice using GPS data. The results enhance our understanding of non-work travel behavior and have implications for transportation and land use planning.
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    Climbing Mount Next - The Effects of Autonomous Vehicles on Society
    (University of Minnesota, 2015) Levinson, David M
    The United States spent almost the entire twentieth century climbing Mount Auto. From the 1920s onward, the automobile was the dominant mode of travel for Americans, accumulating more miles per capita than other modes. While the Great Depression slowed the auto’s growth, it did not result in decline. There was a brief downturn during World War II, and a few hiccups in the steady rise of mileage. But the later 2000s and 2010s have seen a sharp downturn in motor vehicle use per capita. This drop is greater than the drop during World War II in absolute terms (though the War saw a drop of twenty-three percent off the pre-war peak, and the 2012 drop is seven percent below 2005). It is complemented by an apparent plateauing in total miles of paved roads since 2008. Within the transportation sector there have been small shifts over the past fifteen years, which cannot explain much of the decline of travel. There are active transportation modes, like walking and biking, which work well for short trips, and certainly have niches they can grow into if land development intensifies and people reorganize their lives to enable them. For instance, I am one of the seven percent of Minneapolitans who walk to work. The numbers are much lower outside core cities, and nationally, at three percent. Transit ridership per capita is up ever so slightly. There are a slew of new mobility options which use information technologies to allow travel without owning an automobile, but are not yet visible in the transportation statistics. These include peer-to-peer taxi and ridesharing services and dynamic real-time rental cars. While these are useful in their niches, they likely are not cost-effective enough to be the main transportation mode for the vast majority of the population with the given technology. Today these new mobility options are supplements when the main mode does not solve the job to be done. In the future, that might change. Technologies allow people to do more of the same, and they allow people to do new things. It is easier to predict more of the same than new things.