1,720,975 research outputs found
Metropolitan Governance for Sustainable Mobility
No full textLand use and mobility interactions in the modern metropolis manifest themselves in two competing, age-old, forces: centripetal forces pulling us together into agglomerations and centrifugal forces pushing us ever further into the metropolitan hinterland. Thus, mobility is a fundamental part of urbanization and metropolitanization processes. Furthermore, mobility also serves as the core metric in defining metropolitan areas, helping identify functional urban areas. This chapter aims to elucidate some of the challenges to governing metropolises for sustainable mobility, defined by the author as the ability to provide non-declining accessibility in time. The chapter analyzes mobility governance and interrelating theories with concrete examples from the United States, Portugal, and Mexico, offering a glimpse of the complexity and posing central yet still unresolved questions. In whose ultimate interest
is metropolitan mobility and who should pay for it? How related are the form of governance with the quality of the governance outcome? By what outcomes can metropolitan mobility performance be compared? Can these outcomes be meaningfully compared across metropolises? The chapter concludes noting a contradiction: while the finance system is a critical factor in determining metropolitan mobility governance, formal metropolitan mobility finance systems rarely exist. The author argues that using money to move the metropolis in the right direction offers hope, largely unfilled to date, to improve, and ultimately sustain, accessibility
Mainstreaming sustainable urban transport: putting the pieces together
No full textThe term ‘sustainability’ has ploughed itself into mainstream development dialogue and literature, if not entirely into popular jargon. One does not need to look far to find references to sustainable housing, consumption, forestry, agriculture etc. The concept of sustainability – meeting present needs while maintaining the capability to meet future needs – has proved invaluable in making society explicitly aware of the need to pass on natural resources to future generations. Sustainability has also come to encompass a
broader development agenda, focused on the balance of environmental, social and economic objectives. In this sense, sustainability has been useful in establishing a more level rhetorical playing field among possibly competing objectives. At the same time, the broadening of the meaning of sustainability and the increasing ubiquity of the term’s use runs the risk of watering down the meaning of the concept. When sustainability becomes associated with more and more, does it start to mean less and less
Safely active mobility for urban baby boomers: The role of neighborhood design
No full textMany urban designers and researchers argue that walkable urban environments can encourage older residents’ walking activities that benefit their physical health. However, walking also exposes older adults to safety risks, including due to traffic accidents. This study seeks to reveal the interactions between urban form and safety affecting urban baby boomers’ walking behavior. Spatial analysis reveals traffic collision patterns in urban Boston neighborhoods, detecting hotspots around activity centers. Structural equation modeling, estimated on individual data collected from a mail-back survey and utilizing numerous measures of neighborhood urban form and accessibility, then attempts to reveal the causal, interacting relationships between neighborhood-level urban form, traffic crashes, and baby boomers’ walking behavior. The analysis identifies significant effects of walkable urban forms (e.g., mixed use, well-connected streets, and good access to potential destinations) on older adults’ walking. Yet, accessibility to retail, as well as traffic speed and volume, are positively associated with the traffic collision frequency. The results suggest more cautious approaches may be necessary for designing urban spaces for walkability and also call into question prescriptions based on the “safety in numbers” hypothesis
Does urban living influence baby boomers’ travel behavior?
No full textWe compare the travel behavior of urban versus suburban baby boomers in the Boston metropolitan area. Using propensity score matching to attempt to control for self-selection and data from two surveys implemented in 2008 and 2010, we find that the urban boomers tend to be less automobile-dependent than suburban baby boomers. Urban baby boomers also make more recreational non-motorized transport (NMT), social, utilitarian, and transit commute trips. Most of these differences seem to be primarily a result of the urban setting, not the particular preferences of boomers living in urban settings. We find very small self-selection effects on automobile commuting, recreational NMT, and utilitarian trips: 1–7% of observed influence. We also find some evidence that baby boomers’ preference for social activities tends to be mismatched to their environments – suburban boomers want more social opportunities than their settings enable. For public transport, we find a relatively large self-selection effect, 43% of observed influence, suggesting a transit-oriented boomer market segment exists.New England University Transportation Cente
Spatiotemporal Dynamics in Public Transport Personal Security Perceptions: Digital Evidence from Mexico City's Periphery
Get PDFThe potential for information and communication technologies (ICTs) to revolutionise transportation is of long-standing interest. Just as the telegraph, trans-oceanic cable communications, the telephone, and the fax surely influenced travel behaviours and supply of transportation infrastructures and services, related developments, especially in computing, have changed the way we analyse and plan systems. The most recent wave of ICT-related technological advances – epitomised by high-powered sensing and realtime
computing capabilities – promises a new era of seamless services, autonomous vehicles, and high resolution system micro-simulation, to name a few emerging opportunities.Singapore. National Research FoundationSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Center. Future Urban Mobilit
Fiscal federalism and prospects for metropolitan transportation authorities in Portugal
No full textFiscal federalism refers to the attribution of public finance functions among different levels of government. We examine Portugal's metropolitan transportation sector through the fiscal federalist lens, in light of the country's decentralization efforts and new relevant legislation. We clarify basic principles of fiscal federalism and adapt them to the finance of metropolitan transportation systems – typically characterized by multiple jurisdictions, numerous externalities and equity concerns – showing the inadequacy of general practice. Portugal's overall public finance system partially adheres to fiscal federalist principles; the transportation sector less so. Metropolitan transportation faces particular troubles, with few direct user fees, prices inadequately reflecting costs, and heavy reliance on central government subsidies for public transportation investments and operations. A new law creating metropolitan transportation authorities is only modestly consistent with fiscal federalist principles, since it inadequately details financial responsibilities and remains under heavy central government control. Absent additional reforms, the new metropolitan authorities should aim to make the transportation finance system explicit and test incentive grants to induce inter-municipal cooperation.MIT Portugal Progra
Constructing a Synthetic Population of Establishments for the Simmobility Microsimulation Platform
No full textThis paper presents a method for building a synthetic population of establishments in Singapore for incorporation into SimMobility platform, an integrated microsimulation model that represents households' and firms' short-, medium-, and long-term decisions, ranging from lane changing behavior, to daily activity pattern choices, to location choices. The synthetic population includes data on (1) establishments' locations, (2) establishments' industry type, (3) establishments' employment size, and (4) their occupied floor area. Keywords: population synthesis; microsimulation; iterative proportional fitting; SimMobilit
Designing BRT-oriented development
No full textBRT signifies a concrete commitment to bus transit, encompassing coordinated institutional, financial, physical, and operational interventions. This commitment can catalyse wider urban development by improving local and metropolitan accessibility and urban spaces and streetscapes. This chapter explores prospects for such BRT-oriented development (BRTOD).
Transit-oriented development (TOD) aims to leverage the interactions between urban land use, mobility, and socio-economic systems. This chapter examines how BRT corridors might spur TOD, structuring the city and its spaces towards more equitable and transit-conducive urban forms. Specifically, it uses results from a graduate-level planning and design workshop set in two regions, Boston, Massachusetts and Santiago de Chile, to explore how BRT corridors might catalyse cross-disciplinary approaches to urban development. Adopting an integrated approach to the design of transit routes and infrastructures, surrounding public spaces, real estate projects, public policy and governance, the students’ proposals for these two corridors highlight BRT’s transformative potential across diverse urban
settings
Activity recognition for a smartphone and web-based human mobility sensing system
No full textActivity-based models in transport modeling and prediction are built from a large number of observed trips and their purposes. However, data acquired through traditional interview-based travel surveys is often inaccurate and insufficient. Recently, a human mobility sensing system, called Future Mobility Survey (FMS), was developed and used to collect travel data from more than 1,000 participants. FMS combines a smartphone and interactive web interface in order to better infer users activities and patterns. This paper presents a model that infers an activity at a certain location. We propose to generate a set of predictive features based on spatial, temporal, transitional, and environmental contexts with an appropriate quantization. In order to improve the generalization performance of the proposed model, we employ a robust approach with ensemble learning. Empirical results using FMS data demonstrate that the proposed method contributes significantly to providing accurate activity estimates for the user in our travel-sensing application
Transport, Climate Change and the City
No full textBook review of "Transport, Climate Change and the City.
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