Open source, spatial analysis, and activity-travel behaviour research: capabilities of the aspace package

Abstract

This paper reports on recent experience with the development of aspace, an Open Source (OS) library for the geographic visualization and analysis of activity-travel behaviour. The paper begins with an overview of recent progress with respect to the convergence of Open Source technology, spatial analysis, and travel behaviour research. The remainder of the paper focuses on aspace; a collection of functions that, when combined with data describing the geographical location of daily activities, can be used to visualize and describe spatial properties of individual and household activity spaces. These properties include: size, orientation, shape, and the geographical dispersion of activity locations contained within the activity space. Several planar geometries are used to transform measurable spatial properties into intuitive objects for visualizing spatial patterns of activity participation. Experiments are conducted, using data from the first wave of the 2003 Toronto Travel Activity Panel Survey, to demonstrate the potential application of aspace for basic and applied policy-based research into activity-travel behaviour. The toolkit is distributed as a downloadable 'package' from the Open Source R Project for Statistical Computing.