Journal: Journal of Transport Geography

Abbreviation

J. Transp. Geogr.

Publisher

Elsevier

Journal Volumes

ISSN

0966-6923
1873-1236

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Publications 1 - 10 of 36
  • The E-Bike City as a radical shift toward zero-emission transport
    Item type: Journal Article
    Ballo, Lukas; Meyer de Freitas, Lucas; Meister, Adrian; et al. (2023)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    This think piece discusses current barriers to the rapid decarbonization of transport and ways to overcome them. Policymakers face a set of contradictory goals, leading them to ponder only incremental measures: The need to reduce carbon emissions conflicts with accessibility improvements and the resulting induced traffic. At the same time, the prevention of urban sprawl as a means of promoting sustainable mobility is fundamentally thwarted by technical advances in electric cars and autonomous driving. Unable to attract public acceptance for measures that would effectively reduce travel demand, transport policy is failing to provide convincing transition pathways toward sustainable and equitable mobility for growing urban populations. As a possible way forward, we propose a new starting point for transport policy discussions, exploring the feasibility of urban transport systems based on sustainable, flexible, and relatively cheap modes of active mobility – the E-Bike City. This paper aims to outline a research agenda for testing the effects of such a policy direction. In contrast to the literature on “cycling cities”, this effort should include possibilities newly opened by the recent availability of electric micro-mobility vehicles. Also, it should aim for a balanced and realistic transition rather than a unimodal utopia. Inspired by friendly conversations around recent urban visions like 15-Minute Cities or Superblocks, this paper is meant to begin a new discussion about alternative future directions for transport policy beyond mere optimization and technical incrementalism.
  • Betweenness-accessibility
    Item type: Journal Article
    Sarlas, Georgios; Páez, Antonio; Axhausen, Kay W. (2020)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    Accessibility is a central concept in transport geography research that has been described as a holistic measure of transportation and land use systems. This concept has numerous implementations, but virtually all share the way accessibility is measured as an attribute of pairs of origins and destinations. Borrowing from concepts in network science, in this paper we propose a new centrality measure called betweenness-accessibility. This measure couples the familiar betweenness indicator of social networks with the geographical concept of accessibility. Betweenness-accessibility is useful to estimate the impacts of accessibility on networks as potential for interaction is reflected on them. The new measure is illustrated using a reproducible example. In addition, an application to vulnerability analysis in the city of Zurich, Switzerland, provides an empirical case study to showcase the usefulness of betweenness-accessibility.
  • Spatially-aware station based car-sharing demand prediction
    Item type: Journal Article
    Mühlematter, Dominik J.; Wiedemann, Nina; Xin, Yanan; et al. (2024)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    In recent years, car-sharing services have emerged as viable alternatives to private individual mobility, promising more sustainable and resource-efficient, but still comfortable transportation. Research on short-term prediction and optimization methods has improved operations and fleet control of car-sharing services; however, long-term projections and spatial analysis are sparse in the literature. We propose to analyze the average monthly demand in a station-based car-sharing service with spatially-aware learning algorithms that offer high predictive performance as well as interpretability. Our study utilizes a rich set of socio-demographic, location-based (e.g., POIs), and car-sharing-specific features as input, extracted from a large proprietary car-sharing dataset and publicly available datasets. We first compare the performance of different modeling approaches and find that a global Random Forest with geo-coordinates as part of input features achieves the highest predictive performance with an R-squared score of 0.87 on test data. While a local linear model, Geographically Weighted Regression, performs almost on par in terms of out-of-sample prediction accuracy. We further leverage the models to identify spatial and socio-demographic drivers of car-sharing demand. An analysis of the Random Forest via SHAP values, as well as the coefficients of GWR and MGWR models, reveals that besides population density and the car-sharing supply, other spatial features such as surrounding POIs play a major role. In addition, MGWR yields exciting insights into the multiscale heterogeneous spatial distributions of factors influencing car-sharing behaviour. Together, our study offers insights for selecting effective and interpretable methods for diagnosing and planning the placement of car-sharing stations.
  • An empirical analysis of dockless bike-sharing utilization and its explanatory factors
    Item type: Journal Article
    Li, Aoyong; Zhao, Pengxiang; Huang, Yizhe; et al. (2020)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    Revealing dockless bike-sharing utilization pattern and its explanatory factors are essential for urban planners and operators to improve the utilization and turnover of public bikes. This study explores the dockless bike-sharing utilization pattern from the perspective of bike using GPS-based bike origin-destination data collected in Shanghai, China. In this paper, utilization patterns are captured by decoupling several spatially cohesive regions with intensive bike use via non-negative matrix factorization. We then measure the utilization efficiency of bikes within each sub-region by calculating Time to booking (ToB) for each bike and explore how the built environment and social-demographic characteristics influence the bike-sharing utilization with ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models. The matrix factorization results indicate that the shared bikes mainly serve a certain area instead of the whole city. In addition, the GWR model shows higher explanatory power (Adjusted R2 = 0.774) than the OLS regression model (Adjusted R2 = 0.520), which suggests a close relationship between bike-sharing utilization and the selected explanatory variables. The coefficients of the GWR model reveal the spatial variations of the linkage between bike-sharing utilization and its explanatory factors across the study area. This study can shed light on understanding the demand and supply of shared bikes for rebalancing and provide support for operators to improve the dockless bike-sharing utilization efficiency.
  • How does the effect of walkability on walking behavior vary with the time of day?
    Item type: Journal Article
    He, Xuan; He, Sylvia Y. (2025)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    Understanding the relationship between walkability and walking behavior is essential for designing pedestrian-friendly cities. This study examines the spatiotemporal patterns of walkability's effects on walking behavior in Shenzhen, China. To assess temporal aspects, we divided the time of day into five periods: before the AM peak, during the AM peak, between the AM and PM peaks, during the PM peak, and after the PM peak. Walkability was quantified based on four pedestrian needs—safety, convenience, continuity, and attractiveness—and incorporated facility opening hours and pedestrian visual factors derived from street view imagery. Over 1.75 billion walking trips were collected from six months of mobile phone data in 2021. We examined the temporal dynamics of walkability's relative importance and spatial effects on walking trips through machine learning and geospatial models. The results show that convenience was ranked the highest among the four pedestrian needs. Living services were the most important element during the AM peak and between the AM and PM peaks. For the other three periods, leisure services were the highest-ranked factor in relative importance. Based on these results, we propose timing-specific intervention strategies for the building of walkable and inclusive cities.
  • Expanding a(n) (electric) bicycle-sharing system to a new city
    Item type: Journal Article
    Guidon, Sergio; Reck, Daniel Jan; Axhausen, Kay W. (2020)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    Bicycle-sharing systems have experienced strong growth in the last two decades as part of a global trend that started in the 1990s and accelerated after 2005. Early bicycle-sharing systems were provided primarily as a public service by cities. Today, major international bicycle-sharing companies are emerging and seeking to expand their operations to new cities. Two major strategic questions arise: (1) which cities should be considered for expansion and (2) what should be the geographical extent of the service area? An important factor in such decision-making is the expected demand for bicycle-sharing because it relates directly to potential revenue. In this paper, booking data from an electric bicycle-sharing system was used to estimate and assess models for bicycle-sharing demand and to predict expansion to a new city. Employment, population, bars, restaurants and distance to a central location were amongst the most important predictors in terms of variance explained in the same city. Omitting centrality measures improved predictions for the new city.
  • Spatial and temporal analysis of bike-sharing use in Cologne taking into account a public transit disruption
    Item type: Journal Article
    Schimohr, Katja; Scheiner, Joachim (2021)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    This research analyzes the relationship between bike-sharing and public transit using bike-sharing data collected in Cologne, Germany. The selected system is one of very few in Germany that is organized as a free-floating system, which allows the generation of more detailed data. A construction site in the light rail network causing multiple disruptions in the public transit network offered the possibility to detect changes in bike-sharing usage that occur in the corresponding period. Applying negative binomial regression, spatial and temporal usage patterns are analyzed to identify connections to the public transit network and other factors influencing the usage of bike sharing. The analysis suggests the existence of a spatial relationship between bike-sharing and public transit. Therefore, an intermodal use of both means of transport can be assumed. The short-term changes in the public transit network caused by the construction site only have minor impacts on the usage patterns. Other factors that affect the usage structures could be identified. Proximity to universities as well as the number of certain points of interest nearby, such as food outlets and shops, promote bike-sharing use. Higher temperatures are also positively correlated, while rain reduces usage. The findings of the study can be beneficial to integrate bike-sharing into urban transport systems, especially regarding public transit.
  • Analyzing spatiotemporal distribution patterns of metro ridership
    Item type: Journal Article
    Gao, Fan; Han, Chunyang; Yang, Linchuan; et al. (2024)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    Understanding differentiated services is pivotal for enhancing the appeal and diversity of the metro system, yet this facet has received relatively scant attention in existing literature. To bridge this research gap, our analysis delves into the business-class services offered by the metro and compares them with the common-class offerings. First, we illustrate the spatial and temporal patterns of business- and common-class ridership across stations and hours. Second, we construct two-stage geographically weighted regression models to identify key determinants and their spatiotemporally heterogeneous effects, focusing on land-use patterns, demographic considerations, and intermodal transfer modes. Leveraging one-week smart card data collected in Shenzhen from May 13th to 17th, 2019, our findings underscore the following aspects: (1) Spatial and temporal variations in business-class ridership across stations are linked to diverse land-use configurations. (2) Bus-metro transfers, business establishments, medical facilities, and the proportion of young commuters contribute significantly to the business-class ridership. (3) The emergence of business-class trip is weakly associated with bike-sharing activities but has a strong correlation with bus transfers. (4) Business establishments and medical facilities exhibit nuanced impacts on business-class travel, with excessive aggregation leading to unintended consequences. These insights offer valuable policy implications for fostering the development of business-class services in the metro systems of other Chinese cities.
  • Exploring the influence of social relations and knowledge of the urban environment on leisure travel
    Item type: Journal Article
    Gramsch-Calvo, Benjamin; Axhausen, Kay W. (2024)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    Most leisure travel is motivated by interactions within one’s social network, which influence the choice of activities undertaken in the city. In this paper, we employ a structural regression model to distinguish between the direct effect of social relations on leisure travel —measured as venue variety and activity space— and a complementary effect through the knowledge of the urban environment. The model was applied to a survey conducted in Zurich, Switzerland. The results demonstrate that individuals with stronger social relations are more aware of the activities that can be performed in the city. Furthermore, social relations serve as a stronger explanatory variable for leisure activity space, whereas knowledge of the urban environment has more influence on venue variety. Accessibility also plays a significant role; higher accessibility reduces leisure activity space while increasing venue variety.
  • Zooming in and out on everyday mobility practices in a rural, mountainous area of Switzerland
    Item type: Journal Article
    Maeder, Stefanie; Stauffacher, Michael; Knaus, Florian (2023)
    Journal of Transport Geography
    To combat climate change, carbon emissions from everyday mobility must be lowered. This can be achieved by improving vehicle efficiency, shifting to low-carbon modes of transport and avoiding travel. Most of the literature focuses on shifting mobility away from cars, mainly in the context of commuting. However, mobility is embedded deeply in everyday life and is much more complex. This research tries to broaden the scope and not only analyse the mode of transport that people choose but also the purposes that their mobility serves and how this influences their modal choice. Contrary to the dominant literature's emphasis on urban mobility, this study focuses on rural mobility, highlighting its specific challenges. As a case study, the mobility practices of residents of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Entlebuch (UBE) in Switzerland were investigated. Using a social practice approach has proven useful in analysing how individuals shape their everyday mobility. The study ‘zooms in’ on how practices are configured and ‘zooms out’ on the connection between mobility practices and mobility purposes, with the overarching aim to explore the key characteristics and dynamics of rural everyday transport in Switzerland, using the UBE as a case study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed adopting a thematic analysis approach. The results indicate that in the rural context geographical conditions and infrastructure availability exert more influence on how practices are performed than in urban contexts. Also, the time spent on mobility was valued differently depending on the mobility purpose, leading to different modal choices for different mobility purposes. Finally, the results demonstrate that strong social capital within a community can foster low-carbon mobility in three ways: shorter distances travelled for shopping and leisure purposes; a preference for active modes of transport; and self-organised collective transport. These findings highlight the importance of considering mobility practices' embeddedness in everyday life while identifying potentials for shifting to low-carbon modes of transport, as well as avoiding travel in the first place.
Publications 1 - 10 of 36