Journal of Urban Mobility最新文献

Recently, in Winnipeg, the implementation of new bus rapid transit (BRT) system in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic has raised many concerns, challenging the rationale behind the untimely release. However, the new BRT service can benefit low-income, socio-economically vulnerable, and transit captive passengers who must travel to essential services and work opportunities during the pandemic. This study evaluates whether the new BRT system has positive impacts on accessibility to such essential services during the pandemic. Isochrones with different time budgets as well as times of a day are generated based on high-resolution public transit network via the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data and used for evaluating accessibility benefits before and after the BRT construction. The new BRT service in Winnipeg demonstrates varying accessibility impacts across different parts of the BRT corridor. Areas near dedicated lane-section show a significant increase, whereas areas near non-dedicated lane sections show a decrease in accessibility. Nevertheless, across the whole BRT corridor, the new BRT service presents an overall increase in accessibility to essential services. This demonstrates the positive accessibility benefits of the new BRT service to residents seeking essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic. A decrease in accessibility along some parts suggests the necessity of using local transit improvement strategies (e.g., dedicated lanes) to improve service speed when planning BRT services within urban areas.

To achieve the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Climate Agreement, it is of great importance to promote environmentally friendly means of transport. In urban areas, shifting motorized trips to active transport modes (i.e., walking and cycling) is essential. Therefore, knowledge of walking and cycling is indispensable for planning and policy, which is the basis for targeted promotion of active forms of mobility. This paper aims to identify factors that specifically influence cycling and to derive recommendations for action for planning and policy in a virtual testbed. Specifically, the influence of traffic planning measures (i.e., structural infrastructure facilities for stationary and moving traffic as well as traffic regulations) and urban design measures (i.e., the design of public space) on the promotion of cycling will be shown. For this purpose, a virtual reality simulation was used, independent of different external conditions during field surveys and the necessity of time-, cost- and regulation-intensive structural changes. Using an improved bicycle simulator, 93 people cycled through 20 variations of an approximately 680 m long road section, surveying the effect of selected traffic planning and urban design parameters. Special attention was paid to the subjective safety of the cyclists and the attractiveness of the urban environment. Furthermore, three types of infrastructure were differentiated: No bicycle infrastructure (riding on the roadway), a bicycle lane, and a structurally separated cycle path next to the sidewalk. The virtual road section represented a real location. In addition to the findings gained from the physiological optimization of the simulator, the results show that roadside greenery had the highest effectiveness in terms of subjective safety and attractiveness. Other factors with a high influence were a speed reduction from 50 to 30 km/h when riding on the roadway with cars and the red coloring of the bicycle lane, each increasing the perception of safety. In contrast, a lack of a boundary line between the cycle path and the sidewalk was unsettling for those who rarely or never ride bicycles in their daily lives. In addition, restaurant and recreation areas increased the attractiveness of the road section, although entailing a lower perception of safety. Other factors, such as motor vehicle traffic volume or vehicles parked at the roadside, showed no significant effects on the evaluation of cycling.

With the help of these findings, the consequences of traffic planning and urban design measures can be better assessed in subsequent virtual testbeds. Also, initial trends can be identified as to which planning instruments should be used as a priority to promote cycling in urban areas. Future work should validate the transfer of these insights into physical urban spaces to support further the mid-term transformation towards sustainable urban mobility using scientific evidence.

Our mainstream mobility thinking is narrowly framed: it highlights the role of mobility in economic and urban growth, individual speed and system efficiency, but obscures its role in reproducing inequalities, and in driving unsustainable developments on a global scale. Critically, however, this narrative obscures our view on the increasingly problematic societal and environmental ‘externalities’ of mobility, such as its significant contribution to climate change, air pollution, social exclusion, deaths and injuries, public health issues and landscape degradation. With such high stakes for our common mobility futures, how can we identify seeds of emerging alternatives, nurture and amplify their potential impact and empower emerging alternative futures?

Urban ropeways are a novel option to extend public transport. Technically suited to a range of use cases, urban ropeways have not yet been implemented as part of a public transport solution in Germany. Rather than the technology itself, specific routines and practices of the public transport service regime have been identified as main challenges. Building on series of expert workshops conducted in 2017 (23 participants in total), we look beyond technical characteristics and study the preparedness of service regime actors regarding processes and routines as well as structural factors of inertia. Generally, we observe an increasing openness towards reflecting about integrating urban ropeways into public transport. However, misalignment is still clearly visible: First, lacking experiences with this new option at the local level imply a time-consuming need for information and clarification. Second, and more fundamentally, the suitability of established planning routines is questioned, which is critical because the dense regulatory framework existing in Germany currently requires these. We discuss the implications at the level of the service regime and the relevance of these structural mechanisms in considering technological potentials in a mobility transition more generally.

The analysis of longitudinal travel data enables investigating how mobility patterns vary across the population and identify the spatial properties thereof. The objective of this study is to identify the extent to which users explore different parts of the network as well as identify distinctive user groups in terms of the spatial extent of their mobility patterns. To this end, we propose two means for representing spatial mobility profiles and clustering travellers accordingly. We represent users patterns in terms of zonal visiting frequency profiles and grid-cells spatial extent heatmaps. We apply the proposed analysis to a large-scale multi-modal mobility dataset from the public transport system in Stockholm, Sweden. We unravel three clusters - Locals, Commuters and Explorers - that best describe the zonal visiting frequency and show that their composition varies considerably across users’ place of residence. We also identify 15 clusters of visiting spatial extent based on the intensity and direction in which they are oriented. A cross-analysis of the results of the two clustering methods reveals that user segmentation based on exploration patterns and spatial extent are largely independent, indicating that the two different clustering approaches provide fundamentally different insights into the underlying spatial properties of individuals’ mobility patterns. The approach proposed and demonstrated in this study could be applied for any longitudinal individual travel demand data.