Abstract
Understanding the spatial and temporal movement patterns of residents visiting urban parks is essential to link park use with human well-being. There has been increasing interest recently in quantifying travel behaviors, but most studies have focused on flows of commuters within cities or tourists flows between cities. Actual, specific spatial and temporal connections between urban parks and residents within cities are still poorly understood. Here, we present an approach to take different types of travel flows into account when mapping and quantifying the spatial delivery and temporal dynamics of specific travel flows. This approach is based on empirical investigation of individuals’ movements from their homes to parks and online map navigation technology. The flow maps we generated capture key travel flow patterns, addressing where, which, when, and how much they were associated with the use of recreational service provided by urban parks in Wuhan, China, during the summers of 2015 and 2016. Such maps may aid efforts to restore or improve the efficiency of park access and use. We also examined bundles of these spatial and temporal flows, and show that similar transport conditions were important for bundling spatial flows, while temporal flow bundles were significantly related to spatial features. These findings could help to reveal potential trade-offs and synergies of travel flows associated with space and time constraints and facilitate exploration of policy alternatives for equitable and efficient use of urban park systems.
Highlights
Urban parks are intended and designed to offer diverse recreational service, which are important for enhancing the health and well-being of urban residents [1,2]
The flow maps of travel to visit parks generated in our study capture key flow patterns showing where, which, and how much of the travel flows were being undertaken with the purpose of using the recreational services of urban parks
This paper presents a visual impression of the spatial delivery and temporal dynamics of park visitor flows in Wuhan in summer, by mapping the movements of residents from their homes to parks, based on empirical investigation
Summary
Urban parks are intended and designed to offer diverse recreational service, which are important for enhancing the health and well-being of urban residents [1,2]. Temporal variations in travel flows have been examined in recent studies, including differences in the behavior of residents between weekdays and weekends [10] as well as seasonal variations [11] The majority of these studies typically focus on commuting, while travel for recreational purpose has been largely ignored, lack of knowledge of these dynamics hinders understanding the interactions between urban parks and residents. Past studies have used various algorithms to compute scenic routes in order to identify recreational service flows within scenic spots, for example using Path Attribution Networks (SPANs) [18,19], a single objective shortest path algorithm [20] or road segment-based clustering of geo-tagged photos and Flickr images [21,22] Despite these studies having the clear purpose of examining recreational service use, and recreational service flows within scenic spots being clearly quantified, the spatial and temporal connections between scenic spots and residences still remain unclear. The second section of the questionnaire was designed to elicit information on respondents’ demographic characteristics, including their age, gender and occupation
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