Abstract
AbstractUnderstanding the movements of people is essential for the design and management of urban areas. This article presents a novel approach to understanding the asymmetry in route choice (i.e., the degree to which people choose different walking routes for their outbound and return journeys). The study utilizes a large volume of traces of individual routes, captured using a smartphone application. The routes are aggregated to a regular grid, and matrix statistics are developed to estimate the aggregate degree of route asymmetry for different types of route (shortest, longest, weekday, weekend, etc.). The results suggest that people change their route approximately 15% of the time. Although this varied little when observing trips made at the weekend or on a weekday, people taking journeys that deviated substantially from the shortest possible path were 6 percentage points less likely to change their routes than those taking journeys that were closest to the shortest path (14 and 20% asymmetry, respectively). The absolute length also impacted on the asymmetry of journeys, but not as substantially. This result is important because, for the first time, it reports a correlation between deviation from shortest route and aggregate pedestrian choice.
Highlights
Understanding the movements of people is of vital importance for the design and management of urban areas; both in terms of physical infrastructure planning and for the provision of public or private transportation
For the traces with the least deviation (DC), the percentage asymmetry increases to 20.14%
This article has leveraged large-volume, high-resolution route trace data in order to better understand the movements of people in urban areas
Summary
Understanding the movements of people is of vital importance for the design and management of urban areas; both in terms of physical infrastructure planning and for the provision of public or private transportation. Designing areas that encourage walking is an important urban design goal—for examples, see Lynch (1960), Jacobs (1961), Cervero and Duncan (2003), Ewing, Handy, Brownson, Clemente, and Winston (2006), and Forsyth, Hearst, Oakes, and Schmitz (2008)—but collecting evidence about the degree of success or failure of particular designs can be extremely difficult Research efforts such as this offer an opportunity to begin to quantify the actual usage of urban infrastructure by pedestrians, and could help to inform planners in the creation of better urban spaces for pedestrians. It (in Section 3.5) compares the trip lengths to their shortest-path equivalents in order to begin to unpack the relationship between (a)symmetry and path length.
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