JTLU Volume 6, No. 3 (2013)

Persistent link for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/11299/170179

Table of Contents:

Information, communication, travel behavior and accessibility, pp. 1-16

Making accessibility analyses accessible: A tool to facilitate the public review of the effects of regional transportation plans on accessibility, pp. 17-28

The implications of and institutional barriers to compact land development for transportation: Evidence from Bejing, pp. 29-42

Measuring transportation at a human scale: An intercept survey approach to capture pedestrian activity, pp. 43-59

A multidimensional decisions modeling framework for built space supply, pp. 61-74

The impact of weight matrices on parameter estimation and inference: A case study of binary response using land-use data, pp. 75-85

Book Review: Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser, pp. 87-89

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Information, communication, travel behavior and accessibility
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013) Van Wee, Bert; Geurs, Karst; Chorus, Casper
Over the past two decades many papers have been published on the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on travel behavior, but the literature focusing on the impact of ICT on accessibility is relatively scarce. In this paper we give an overview of the impact of ICT on four components of accessibility as distinguished by Geurs and van Wee (2004): (1) the land-use component, (2) the transportation component, (3) the temporal component, and (4) the individual component. Conclusions are that first much more literature exists on the potential impacts of ICT on travel behavior than on its impact on accessibility. Second, we argue that ICT potentially has an impact on all four components of the concept of accessibility. Literature exists on the direct impacts but fails to incorporate impacts due to the interactions between the accessibility components. Third, there seems to be a major challenge in developing accessibility measures and indicators that include ICT, including those that measure the utility of accessibility. Fourth, in the area of ICT’s impact on travel behavior, many research gaps exist. Examples are the impact of ICT on overall activity and trip patterns, the impact of ICT on activities and trips at the household and social-network level, ICT as a means of avoiding congestion or mitigating its effects, and the role of the phenomenon of self-selection in the context of ICT use. Finally, a major challenge is to develop models for activities, including ICT-impacts, which combine high levels of behavioral realism with (econometric) tractability.
Making accessibility analyses accessible: A tool to facilitate the public review of the effects of regional transportation plans on accessibility
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013) Golub, Aaron; Robinson, Glenn; Nee, Brendan
The regional transportation planning process in the United States has not been easily opened to public oversight even after strengthened requirements for public participation and civil rights considerations. In the effort to improve the public review of regional transportation plans, this paper describes the construction of a proof-of concept web-based tool designed to analyze the effects of regional transportation plans on accessibility to jobs and other essential destinations. The tool allows the user to analyze disparities in accessibility outcomes by demographic group, specifically income and race, as required by civil rights-related planning directives. The tool makes cumulative-opportunity measures of the number of essential destinations reachable within certain times by public transit and automobile. The tool is constructed to analyze the San Francisco Bay Area’s 2005 regional transportation plan. Users can choose to make measures for a particular neighborhood or for all neighborhoods in the region with certain demographic characteristics. Two example analyses are shown with an interpretation and discussion of calculator outputs.
The implications of and institutional barriers to compact land development for transportation: Evidence from Bejing
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013) Zhao, Pengjun
Land use patterns are believed to affect transportation, while low-capacity land-use management is often seen as one of the primary institutional barriers to sustainable transport. Examining the case of Beijing, this paper aims to contribute more evidence in relation to these issues. Over the past decades China’s megacities have witnessed a dramatic transition in land use from traditional compact development to sprawling development due to rapid urbanization. This study found that this transition has tended to increase car usage and thus worsen the emission of pollutants by transport in Beijing when growth of income and other socioeconomic factors are taken into account. It is apparent that compact land-use policies need to be reintroduced to reduce car use. However, there are several institutional barriers related to the reintroduction of compact development in the current context of transition from a centrally planned system to a market system in China’s cities. In particular, increasing fragmentation in the realm of land-development management has created serious challenges to the implementation of compact land-development policies. Therefore, institutional capacity building is needed to enable compact land-use policies to control local sprawl and promote sustainable transport.
Measuring transportation at a human scale: An intercept survey approach to capture pedestrian activity
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013) Schneider, Robert James
Pedestrian travel data are critical for measuring and analyzing sustainable transportation systems. However, traditional household travel surveys and analysis methods often ignore secondary modes, such as walking from a street parking space to a store entrance or walking from a bus stop to home. New data collection and analysis techniques are needed, especially in areas where walking is common. This paper describes an intercept survey methodology used to measure retail pharmacy customer travel to, from, and within 20 shopping districts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of the 1003 respondents, 959 (96 percent) reported all modes of travel used from leaving home until returning home, including secondary modes. Walking was the primary travel mode on 21 percent of respondent tours, but an analysis of secondary modes found that 52 percent of tours included some walking. Pedestrian travel was particularly common within shopping districts, accounting for 65 percent of all trips within 804 meters (0.5 miles) of survey stores. Detailed walking path data from the survey showed that respondents in denser, more mixed-use shopping districts tended to walk along the main commercial street as well as other streets connecting to the core shopping area, while respondent pedestrian movements in automobile-oriented shopping districts tended to be contained within specific shopping complexes.
A multidimensional decisions modeling framework for built space supply
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013) Farooq, Bilal; Miller, Eric; Haider, Murtaza
The spatial and temporal distribution of built space supply plays an important role in shaping urban form and thus the general travel pattern in an urban area. Within an integrated framework, we are interested in modeling the decisions of a builder in terms of when, where, what type, and how much built space to build. We present a multidimensional discrete-continuous model formulation for the built space supply decisions that are based on expected profit maximization. The framework is applied to estimate a model for supply of new office space in the greater Toronto area (GTA) for the 1986 to 2006 period. To our knowledge, this work is the first that models the where, when, how much, and what type of office space to build in a single econometric framework at a fairly disaggregate spatial zoning system. The results indicate risk taker behavior on the builders’ part, while market conditions and supply of resources (labor, construction cost, etc.) are also found to be important factors in decision making.
The impact of weight matrices on parameter estimation and inference: A case study of binary response using land-use data
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013) Wany, Yiyi; Kockelman, Kara; Wang, Xiaokun (Cara)
This paper develops two new models and evaluates the impact of using different weight matrices on parameter estimates and inference in three distinct spatial specifications for discrete response. These specifications rely on a conventional, sparse, inverse-distance weight matrix for a spatial auto-regressive probit (SARP), a spatial autoregressive approach where the weight matrix includes an endogenous distance-decay parameter (SARPα), and a matrix exponential spatial specification for probit (MESSP). These are applied in a binary choice setting using both simulated data and parcel-level land-use data. Parameters of all models are estimated using Bayesian methods. In simulated tests, adding a distance-decay parameter term to the spatial weight matrix improved the quality of estimation and inference, as reflected by a lower deviance information criteriaon (DIC) value, but the added sampling loop required to estimate the distance-decay parameter substantially increased computing times. In contrast, the MESSP model’s obvious advantage is its fast computing time, thanks to elimination of a log-determinant calculation for the weight matrix. In the model tests using actual land-use data, the MESSP approach emerged as the clear winner, in terms of fit and computing times. Results from all three models offer consistent interpretation of parameter estimates, with locations farther away from the regional central business district (CBD) and closer to roadways being more prone to (mostly residential) development (as expected). Again, the MESSP model offered the greatest computing-time savings benefits, but all three specifications yielded similar marginal effects estimates, showing how a focus on the spatial interactions and net (direct plus indirect) effects across observational units is more important than a focus on slope-parameter estimates when properly analyzing spatial data.
Book Review: Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013) Good, Max; Derrible, Sybil
The authors review the book Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser (Penguin Press, 2011).