Identifying tourists and analyzing spatial patterns of their destinations from location-based social media data

Reliable travel behavior data is a prerequisite for transportation planning process. In large tourism dependent cities, tourists are the most dynamic population group whose size and travel choices remain unknown to planners. Traditional travel surveys generally observe resident travel behavior and rarely target tourists. Ubiquitous uses of social media platforms in smartphones have created a tremendous opportunity to gather digital traces of tourists at a large scale. In this paper, we present a framework on how to use location-based data from social media to gather and analyze travel behavior of tourists. We have collected data of about 67,000 users from Twitter using its search interface for Florida. We first propose several filtering steps to create a reliable sample from the collected Twitter data. An ensemble classification technique is proposed to classify tourists and residents from user coordinates. The accuracy of the proposed classifier has been compared against the state-of-the-art classification methods. Finally, different clustering methods have been used to find the spatial patterns of destination choices of tourists. Promising results have been found from the output clusters as they reveal most popular tourist spots as well as some of the emerging tourist attractions in Florida. Performance of the proposed clustering techniques has been assessed using internal clustering validation indices. We have analyzed temporal patterns of tourist and resident activities to validate the classification of the users in two separate groups of tourists and residents. Proposed filtering, identification, and clustering techniques will be significantly useful for building individual-level tourist travel demand models from social media data.     

Travel analytics: Understanding how destination choice and business clusters are connected based on social media data

Understanding how destination choice and business clusters are connected is of great importance for designing sustainable cities, fostering flourishing business clusters, and building livable communities. As sharing locations and activities on social media platforms becomes increasingly popular, such data can reveal destination choice and activity space which can shed light on human-environment relationships. To this end, this research models the relationship between characteristics of business clusters and check-in activities from Los Angeles County, California. Business clusters are analyzed via two lenses: the supply side (employment data by industry) and the demand side (on-line check-in data). Spatial and statistical analyses are performed to understand how land use and transportation network features affect the popularity of the identified clusters and their relationships. Our results suggest that a cluster with more employment opportunities and more types of employment is associated with more check-ins. A business cluster that has access to parks or recreational services is also more popular. A business cluster with a longer road network and better connectivity of roads is associated with more check-ins. The visualization of the common visitors between clusters reveals that there are a few clusters with outstanding strong ties, while most have modest ties with each other. Our findings have implications on the influence of urban design on the popularity of business clusters.     

The same mode again? An exploration of mode choice variability in Great Britain using the National Travel Survey

The main focus of travel behaviour research has been explaining differences in behaviour between individuals (interpersonal variability) with less emphasis given to the variability of behaviour within individuals (intrapersonal variability). The subject of this paper is the variability of transport modes used by individuals in their weekly travel. Our review shows that previous studies have not allowed the full use of different modes in weekly travel to be taken into account, have used categorical variables as simple indicators of modal variability and have only considered a limited set of explanatory indicators in seeking to explain modal variability. In our analysis we use National Travel Survey data for Great Britain. We analyse modal variability with continuous measures of modal variability (Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, the difference in mode share between the primary and secondary mode, the total number of modes used). Taking inspiration from Hägerstrand (1970), we conceive that modal variability is determined by different types of spatial mobility constraints and find that reduced modal variability is predicted for having mobility difficulties, being aged over 60, being non-white, working full-time, living in smaller settlement, lower household income, having regular access to a car, having no public transport pass/season ticket and not owning a bicycle. The findings can support a change in perspective in transport policy from encouraging people to replace the use of one mode with another to encouraging people to make a change to their relative use of different transport modes.     

Does crowding affect the path choice of metro passengers?

This paper investigates crowding effect on the path choice of metro passengers. We show people reroute not only to avoid the delay from crowding but also to evade crowding itself. More specifically, a logit model fits best when it uses the transit delay from crowding as well as the passenger load of a connection in addition to the conventional explanatory variables. Also, we demonstrate that crowding decreases the overall welfare of metro passengers. The model is tested on the real path choice data acquired by the recent algorithm by Hong et al. (2015) known to detect the real path choice from Smart Card data in more than 90% of the cases.     

Policy packages for modal shift and CO2 reduction in Lille,France

This paper proposes different policy scenarios to cut CO₂ emissions caused by the urban mobility of passengers. More precisely, we compare the effects of the ‘direct tool’ of carbon tax, to a combination of ‘indirect tools’ – not originally aimed at reducing CO₂ (i.e. congestion charging, parking charges and a reduction in public transport travel time) in terms of CO₂ impacts through a change in the modal split. In our model, modal choices depend on individual characteristics, trip features (including the effects of policy tools), and land use at origin and destination zones. Personal “CO₂ emissions budgets” resulting from the trips observed in the metropolitan area of Lille (France) in 2006 are calculated and compared to the situation related to the different policy scenarios. We find that an increase of 50% in parking charges combined with a cordon toll of €1.20 and a 10% travel time decrease in public transport services (made after recycling toll-revenues) is the winning scenario. The combined effects of all the policy scenarios are superior to their separate effects.     

Capturing correlation with a mixed recursive logit model for activity-travel scheduling

Representing activity-travel scheduling decisions as path choices in a time–space network is an emerging approach in the literature. In this paper, we model choices of activity, location, timing and transport mode using such an approach and seek to estimate utility parameters of recursive logit models. Relaxing the independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property of the logit model in this setting raises a number of challenges. First, overlap in the network may not fully characterize perceptual correlation between paths, due to their interpretation as activity schedules. Second, the large number of states that are needed to represent all possible locations, times and activity combinations imposes major computational challenges to estimate the model. We combine recent methodological developments to build on previous work by Blom Västberg et al. (2016) and allow to model complex and realistic correlation patterns in this type of network. We use sampled choices sets in order to estimate a mixed recursive logit model in reasonable time for large-scale, dense time-space networks. Importantly, the model retains the advantage of fast predictions without sampling choice sets. In addition to estimation results, we present an extensive empirical analysis which highlights the different substitution patterns when the IIA property is relaxed, and a cross-validation study which confirms improved out-of-sample fit.     

Traffic and emissions impact of congestion charging in the central Beijing urban area: A simulation analysis

Congestion charging is being considered as a potential measure to address the issue of substantially increased traffic congestion and vehicle emissions in Beijing. This study assessed the impact of congestion charging on traffic and emissions in Beijing using macroscopic traffic simulation and vehicle emissions calculation. Multiple testing scenarios were developed with assumptions in different charging zone sizes, public transit service levels and charging methods. Our analysis results showed that congestion charging in Beijing may increase public transit use by approximately 13%, potentially reduce CO and HC emissions by 60–70%, and reduce NOx emissions by 35–45% within the charging zone. However, congestion charging may also result in increased travel activities and emissions outside of the charging zone and a slight increase in emissions for the entire urban area. The size of charging zone, charging method, and charging rate are key factors that directly influence the impact of congestion charging; improved public transit service needs to be considered as a complementary approach with congestion charging. This study is used by Beijing Transportation Environment and Energy Center (BTEC) as reference to support the development of Beijing’s congestion charging policy and regulation.     

Electric vehicles and residential parking in an urban environment: Results from a stated preference experiment

This paper presents the results of a preference survey of 1545 respondents’ willingness to purchase electric vehicles (EVs) in Philadelphia. We pay particular attention to respondents’ willingness to pay for convenient charging systems and parking spaces. If the value of dedicated parking substantially outweighs the value of convenient charging systems, residential-based on-street charging systems are unlikely to ever be politically palatable. As expected, respondents are generally willing to pay for longer range, shorter charging times, lower operating costs, and shorter parking search times. For a typical respondent, a $100 per month parking charge decreases the odds of purchasing an EV by around 65%. Across mixed logit and latent class models, we find substantial variation in the willingness to pay for EV range, charge time, and ease of parking. Of note, we find two primary classes of respondents with substantially different EV preferences. The first class tends to live in multifamily housing units in central parts of the city and puts a high value on parking search time and the availability of on-street charging stations. The second class, whose members are likelier to be married, wealthy, conservative, and residing in single-family homes in more distant neighborhoods, are willing to pay more for EV range and charge time, but less for parking than the first group. They are also much likelier to consider purchasing EVs at all. We recommend that future research into EV adoption incorporate neighborhood-level features, like parking availability and average trip distances, which vary by neighborhood and almost certainly influence EV adoption.     

On the variance of recurrent traffic flow for statistical traffic assignment

This paper generalizes and extends classical traffic assignment models to characterize the statistical features of Origin-Destination (O-D) demands, link/path flow and link/path costs, all of which vary from day to day. The generalized statistical traffic assignment (GESTA) model has a clear multi-level variance structure. Flow variance is analytically decomposed into three sources, O-D demands, route choices and measurement errors. Consequently, optimal decisions on roadway design, maintenance, operations and planning can be made using estimated probability distributions of link/path flow and system performance. The statistical equilibrium in GESTA is mathematically defined. Its multi-level statistical structure well fits large-scale data mining techniques. The embedded route choice model is consistent with the settings of O-D demands considering link costs that vary from day to day. We propose a Method of Successive Averages (MSA) based solution algorithm to solve for GESTA. Its convergence and computational complexity are analyzed. Three example networks including a large-scale network are solved to provide insights for decision making and to demonstrate computational efficiency.     

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随着中国城市群的快速发展,城际交通出行环境发生了巨大的变化,因此城际出行者也会不断地重建自己的出行习惯,这就要求建立动态模型研究城际出行者出行行为和预测城际交通需求。本文调查出行者在宁杭城际高铁开通前后两个时期的出行信息,并且引入状态依赖变量表征出行者之前选择结果对之后出行选择的影响,建立了基于面板数据的城际出行方式选择动态模型。模型结果表明,基于面板数据的动态模型比传统的基于出行者单次出行数据的模型拥有更高精度。同时本文根据宁杭城际出行背景设置三组政策变化方案预测出行分担率,结果表明,当选择环境发生变化时,传统模型会高估出行方式分担率的变化程度。以上结论能更好地服务于中国城际交通的规划。