scholarly journals General scores for accessibility and inequality measures in urban areas

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (8) ◽  
pp. 190979 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indaco Biazzo ◽  
Bernardo Monechi ◽  
Vittorio Loreto
Keyword(s):  
Public Transportation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
Scenario Simulation ◽  
Inequality Measures ◽  
To Come ◽  
Simulation Engines ◽  
Significant Effort

In the last decades, the acceleration of urban growth has led to an unprecedented level of urban interactions and interdependence. This situation calls for a significant effort among the scientific community to come up with engaging and meaningful visualizations and accessible scenario simulation engines. The present paper gives a contribution in this direction by providing general methods to evaluate accessibility in cities based on public transportation data. Through the notion of isochrones, the accessibility quantities proposed measure the performance of transport systems at connecting places and people in urban systems. Then we introduce scores ranking cities according to their overall accessibility. We highlight significant inequalities in the distribution of these measures across the population, which are found to be strikingly similar across various urban environments. Our results are released through the interactive platform: www.citychrone.org , aimed at providing the community at large with a useful tool for awareness and decision-making.

scholarly journals Smart-Mobility Services for Climate Mitigation in Urban Areas: Case Studies of Baltic Countries and Germany

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4127
Author(s):  
Gabriele Cepeliauskaite ◽  
Benno Keppner ◽  
Zivile Simkute ◽  
Zaneta Stasiskiene ◽  
Leon Leuser ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Transportation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Transport Sector ◽  
Climate Mitigation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Baltic Countries ◽  
Smart Mobility ◽  
Negative Environmental Impact

The transport sector is one of the largest contributors of CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases. In order to achieve the Paris goal of decreasing the global average temperature by 2 °C, urgent and transformative actions in urban mobility are required. As a sub-domain of the smart-city concept, smart-mobility-solutions integration at the municipal level is thought to have environmental, economic and social benefits, e.g., reducing air pollution in cities, providing new markets for alternative mobility and ensuring universal access to public transportation. Therefore, this article aims to analyze the relevance of smart mobility in creating a cleaner environment and provide strategic and practical examples of smart-mobility services in four European cities: Berlin (Germany), Kaunas (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia) and Tartu (Estonia). The paper presents a systematized literature review about the potential of smart-mobility services in reducing the negative environmental impact to urban environments in various cities. The authors highlight broad opportunities from the European Union and municipal documents for smart-mobility initiatives. The theoretical part is supplemented by socioeconomic and environmental descriptions, as well as experience, related to smart-mobility services in the four cities selected.

scholarly journals Equity in public transport — a case of Bangalore’s city bus transport

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Deepak Baindur ◽  
Pooja Rao
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Public Transport ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Survey Study ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
City Bus ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Impact

In most urban areas, buses are the most heavily used form of public transportation[1] and more so in Indian cities where buses make up for over 90% of public transport ridership[2]. In the selected Indian metro cities, where formal bus based PT systems are operated by public agencies, they are over-reliant on state support to sustain operations as fare box collections are inadequate in spite of having relatively high ridership. The main challenge for all this is to achieve long term financial sustainability of public transport systems while providing good quality and affordable bus services.This paper investigates internal and external factors that led to the steep and recurrent fare increases in the Bangalore city bus services in the period from 2012–2014 which are operated by Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation. In order to estimate the impact of the recent bus fare increases that have had on the economically weaker sections of the society dependent on these services, the paper presents the results of a random sampling survey study carried out in a central locality in the city that has a large slum area.The key findings throw light on the various ways in which the low income bus users have adapted to reduce their travel costs through changes in travel behavior, travel pattern and modal shifts. The cost of the behavioral changes through lost opportunities and the cost of the modal shifts of the persons earlier favoring public transportation draw attention to the significance of public transport fare policies. Furthermore, the management and operations of the BMTC agency show scope for improvement which can translate into better revenue generation and consequent reduction in fares.

scholarly journals Analysis of Aerial Ropeways by following various Indian and International Codes for Urban Mobility with some Structural Modifications in Monocable Ropeways to make it Safe, Secure, Economical and all Weather Durable

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (VI) ◽  
pp. 1539-1548
Author(s):  
Bhat Omair Bashir
Keyword(s):  
Public Transportation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Public Transit ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Urban Transport ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
Transit Systems ◽  
Tourist Attractions ◽  
Structural Modifications ◽  
Transit Service

Cable-propelled transit’ (CPT), in particular detachable aerial ropeways are widely employed as transportation systems in alpine areas. In recent years, these transport systems have also been increasingly used in urban areas and are no longer a niche public transportation technology (Hoffmann 2006, Alshalalfah, Shalaby, and Dale 2014). Cable cars systems compete with performance characteristics of other more common urban transport technologies and have the potential to enhance the existing transport provision in cities (O'Connor and Dale 2011). While many applications can be found as transportation systems in airport facilities, and to provide access to tourist attractions, several metropolitan areas have even incorporated gondolas and aerial tramways into their public transport networks. This paper focuses on aerial ropeway systems that operate as a mass transit service (similar to buses, BRT, LRT, etc.) and are part of the public transit systems in their respective cities. Therefore, the analysis and case studies presented in the paper concern systems that are used as a public transit service

scholarly journals Going carless in different urban fabrics: socio-demographics of household car ownership

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. E. Karjalainen ◽  
M. Tiitu ◽  
J. Lyytimäki ◽  
V. Helminen ◽  
P. Tapio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Transportation ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
National Level ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Neighborhood Density ◽  
Car Ownership ◽  
Sustainable Mobility ◽  
Demographic Profiles ◽  
Residential Distance

AbstractDiverse physical features of urban areas alongside socio-demographic characteristics affect car ownership, and hence the daily mobility choices. As a case of sustainable mobility, we explore how various urban environments and socio-demographics associate with the spatial and social distribution of household car ownership and carlessness in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland. Three urban fabrics characterizing the study area are established based on the transportation mode (walking, public transportation, or automobile) the physical urban environment primarily supports. The national level Monitoring System of Spatial Structure and Urban Form database, and the National Travel Survey (2016) are utilized to further include spatial and socio-demographic variables into our analysis across these fabrics. Our results show that households with and without cars differ in terms of residential distance to the city center, neighborhood density, house type, and socio-demographic profiles. Single pensioners and students are most likely to be carless, whereas families represent the opposite. Within the carless households the differences are also evident between different groups. For the more affluent households residing in dense and well-connected areas, and mostly possessing driver’s licenses, carlessness is presumably a choice. Contrarily, many other carless households represent the less affluent often located in the more distant, low-density, and less accessible areas, while also possessing less driver’s licenses, making carlessness more of a constraint, as the local urban fabric does not support such lifestyle. Consequently, carless households should be increasingly recognized as a focus group in sustainable urban planning in terms of identifiable best practices and potential vulnerability.

scholarly journals Semantic Segmentation of Tree-Canopy in Urban Environment with Pixel-Wise Deep Learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 3054
Author(s):  
José Augusto Correa Martins ◽  
Keiller Nogueira ◽  
Lucas Prado Osco ◽  
Felipe David Georges Gomes ◽  
Danielle Elis Garcia Furuya ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Forests ◽  
Semantic Segmentation ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Tree Canopy ◽  
Environmental Benefits ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Convolutional Network ◽  
Environmental Technologies

Urban forests are an important part of any city, given that they provide several environmental benefits, such as improving urban drainage, climate regulation, public health, biodiversity, and others. However, tree detection in cities is challenging, given the irregular shape, size, occlusion, and complexity of urban areas. With the advance of environmental technologies, deep learning segmentation mapping methods can map urban forests accurately. We applied a region-based CNN object instance segmentation algorithm for the semantic segmentation of tree canopies in urban environments based on aerial RGB imagery. To the best of our knowledge, no study investigated the performance of deep learning-based methods for segmentation tasks inside the Cerrado biome, specifically for urban tree segmentation. Five state-of-the-art architectures were evaluated, namely: Fully Convolutional Network; U-Net; SegNet; Dynamic Dilated Convolution Network and DeepLabV3+. The experimental analysis showed the effectiveness of these methods reporting results such as pixel accuracy of 96,35%, an average accuracy of 91.25%, F1-score of 91.40%, Kappa of 82.80% and IoU of 73.89%. We also determined the inference time needed per area, and the deep learning methods investigated after the training proved to be suitable to solve this task, providing fast and effective solutions with inference time varying from 0.042 to 0.153 minutes per hectare. We conclude that the semantic segmentation of trees inside urban environments is highly achievable with deep neural networks. This information could be of high importance to decision-making and may contribute to the management of urban systems. It should be also important to mention that the dataset used in this work is available on our website.

scholarly journals Public Space, Infrastructure, Landscape: an interdisciplinary matrix for urban spatial continuity

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Luísa Brandão ◽  
Pedro Brandão
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Transition Process ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Spatial Continuity ◽  
Construction Methods ◽  
Space Infrastructure ◽  
Space Production

<p>Spatial growth of cities corresponded to new theoretical and practical knowledge capacities with new kinds of urban infrastructures, new services organisation and new construction methods, of XIX and most of XX century’s industrial space production. The decline of those capacities and a “crisis” of modern models, followed by the still on-going post-industrial transition process of the past 50 years are translated in many different forms of spatial, social, economic and cultural organisation and diversity of emerging urban contexts. Contemporary processes seem to carry difficulties in understanding and conducting urban transformation in such diverse and changing context. What strategic elements can be used to interpret and act in such contexts?<br />In this paper we intend to show an interdisciplinary perspective of public space as part of strategic and theoretical principles recognised by several fields of urban knowledge and practice: we include the spatial continuity of the Commons in those structuring principles, as a notion of urban “publicness”. These new perspectives require a perception of public space that goes beyond traditional city references, to other peripheral or scattered urban areas, but maintaining its fundamental structuring role, as systemic and interactive reference for complex urban environments. Through a study on the specific case of the South Bank of Lisbon Metropolitan Area, we present a conceptual operative matrix, based on the hypothesis of strategic interaction between urban systems, aiming for its structuring potential for spatial continuity – public space, infrastructure and landscape.<br />Outputs of this study aim at a contribution to a more flexible and interactive structuring approach to urban design and planning, focused on interdisciplinary perspectives of public space production.</p>

Transport and Health

Urban Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 52-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Nieuwenhuijsen ◽  
Haneen Khreis
Keyword(s):  
Urban Health ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
Vehicular Pollution ◽  
Traffic Jams ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Improve Health

Densely populated urban areas afford an enormous opportunity for their residents to have access to a range of salutary resources, thus avoiding some of the challenges that characterize less dense communities. However, transportation often bedevils urban areas, with limited opportunities offered for urban residents to get around cities. Traffic jams and vehicular pollution are associated with poor health of urban residents even as the data are clear that investments in public transportation are both cost beneficial and can improve health. Emerging solutions, including autonomous vehicles, stand to transform urban environments and health in these environments. This chapter discusses transportation as a determinant of health in cities, outlining challenges and opportunities for efficient and effective transportation with an eye toward emerging solutions that can improve urban health.

scholarly journals The Role of Culture in Urban Travel Patterns: Quantitative Analyses of Urban Areas Based on Hofstede’s Culture Dimensions

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Enes Dingil ◽  
Federico Rupi ◽  
Joerg Schweizer ◽  
Zaneta Stasiskiene ◽  
Kasra Aalipour
Keyword(s):  
Public Transportation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Transport ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
Travel Patterns ◽  
Urban Travel ◽  
Culture Dimensions ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Relationship

Introduction—culture is an interpretation code of societies, which may explain common preferences in a place. Prediction of alternative transport systems, which could be adopted in a city at peace can help urban transport planners and policy makers adjust urban environments in a more sustainable manner. This paper attempts to investigate the role of Hofstede’s culture dimensions (HCD) on urban travel patterns in 87 urban areas and 41 countries. Analysis—this is the first, systematic analysis investigating the effect of culture on urban travel patterns with open source data from different urban areas around the world. The relationship between HCD and some urban travel patterns such as mode choices (individual transportation and public transportation), car ownership, and infrastructure accessibility (road infrastructure per capita) was demonstrated. In addition, the relationship between culture and some demographic indicators (population density and GDP per capita) closely associated with travel choices are checked. The relations between indicators were identified through correlations and regression models, and calibrated to quantify the relation between indicators. Results and Conclusions—good correlation values between Hofstede’s fundamental culture dimension: individualism/collectivism (IND/COL) and urban travel patterns were demonstrated with a reasonably good fit. The analysis showed that countries with higher individualism build more individualistic transport-related environments, which in turn result in more driving. On the other hand, collective nations tend to use more public transportation. There is significant evidence that, in the case of nations, an increase in tree culture dimensions: collectivism, uncertainty, and masculinity, results in greater usage of public transport.

scholarly journals Using Radical Innovation to Overcome Utility Trade-Offs in Urban Rail Systems in Megalopoleis

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-168
Author(s):  
Marcelo Blumenfeld ◽  
Clive Roberts ◽  
Felix Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
Additional Time ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Rail Systems ◽  
Urban Rail ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Operational Concept ◽  
Time Required

Urban mobility is increasingly becoming accepted as a basic human need, as socio-economic opportunities depend on the ability to reach places within an acceptable time. Conversely, the emergence of megalopoleis as dominant features of the global landscape has increased commuting effort to unprecedented levels, due to the ever expanding urban areas and the associated travel distances. This now poses a risk to the efficient accessibility of cities, but there is an assumption that the problem can be overcome by increasing the speed of transport systems. However, advocates of this approach overlook important utility trade-offs that arise from the conflict between greater vehicle speeds and the additional time required to access the services. In this paper, we investigate this approach and show that higher speeds in metro systems do not always result in faster travel in cities. We then propose a new approach to addressing the problem, which culminates in a solution that can overcome the current paradoxes and increase door-to-door speeds more effectively. The resulting operational concept optimizes speed and coverage in urban rail systems in megalopoleis, accommodating the longer trips within time budgets. We position this research as a starting point to a new perspective on developing complex urban systems in the future.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document