The lack of standards for the equitable distribution of accessibility complicates efforts to address transport poverty. This study identifies equity standards by exploring the relationship between calculated and perceived job accessibility for individuals living in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, Canada. We use calculated accessibility indicators for three modes of travel (active transportation, public transit, and motorized modes) along individual-level variables to estimate ordinal models. To control for endogeneity, we use spatial filters as instrumental variables. Two variables measure the perceptions of accessibility in the sample: the perception of having too few jobs available within an ideal commuting time and the perception of having to decline jobs because of transportation constraints. The results indicate that higher levels of active and transit accessibility tend to mitigate negative perceptions regarding these situations. Based on the results of these models, we identify accessibility thresholds that reduce the likelihood of negative perceptions for equity-deserving groups. We present three equity standards that we classify as conservative, intermediate, and progressive. We believe that these standards can serve as a data-driven example of how to support transportation planning in achieving more equitable outcomes, as well as for participatory processes to collectively define minimum or sufficient accessibility levels.

The “15-Minute City” concept has been embraced by global leaders to promote human-scale neighbourhoods with transport and land-use designs that support short trips to daily necessities. This paper bridges the 15-Minute City to “Mobility of Care”, a framework that foregrounds travel to care destinations, travel done predominately by women. This focus contrasts the more commonly studied travel to employment and leisure destinations. While the 15-Minute City concept is flexible enough to consider all destination types, gendered examinations are relatively lacking in the literature, and little research to date has focused explicitly on care destinations. This gap is addressed in this paper by identifying which areas in the city of Hamilton, Canada are ‘caring 15-minute neighbourhoods’. To do so, a database of care destinations was compiled to estimate the number (using the cumulative opportunity accessibility measure) and diversity of mix (using an entropy measure) of care destinations within a 15-minute walk from residential parcels. Using data-driven machine learning techniques (Self-Organizing Maps and Decision Trees), neighbourhoods were classified into ‘caring 15-minute neighbourhood’ typologies that are examined across residential socio-economic profiles. Our results suggest that the majority of caring 15-minute neighbourhoods are in the urban core, where more lower-income households currently reside. In contrast, areas that lack caring 15-minute neighbourhoods are in higher-income peripheral areas. Areas that make good candidates for urban policy intervention are identified and the implications of enhancing 15-minute walkable caring access are discussed in relation to equtiy and gender mainstreaming in transportation planning and limitations of this work.

Reducing motorized travel and increased active travel are top priorities for many communities. However, these goals are challenged by pressures that make governments reluctant to re/invest in public services, including schools. Public school boards are increasingly asked to do more with less, a directive often accomplished by closing and consolidating schools. Such policies can reduce the proximity of schools for many students, thereby limiting opportunities for active travel. In this paper, we examine the City of Hamilton, a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada, which saw numerous elementary schools closures between 2011 and 2021. Our analysis evaluates how school closures and consolidations reshaped school-seat accessibility (the potential to spatially interact) for elementary school students, both by motorized and active travel. We use spatial availability, a singly-constrained multimodal measure of spatial accessibility. This method's proportional allocation mechanisms allows for consistent comparisons in accessibility between time periods. The analysis is conducted at the parcel level, taking into account the on-the-ground-capacity (OTGC) of schools and observed home-to-school trip lengths for motorized and active modes. Overall, our findings reveal a decline in school spatial availability in the city. While the school closure and consolidation policy pursued by the province may have achieved cost savings in facility operation and maintenance, it imposed ongoing costs on students, families, and communities through reduced opportunities for physical activity and entrenched reliance on motorized travel.

This paper describes {ActiveCA}, an open data product with Canadian time use data. {ActiveCA} is an R data package that contains analysis-ready data related to active travel spanning almost 40 years, extracted from Cycles 2 (1986), 7 (1992), 12 (1998), 19 (2005), 24 (2010), 29 (2015), and 34 (2022) of the Time Use Survey (TUS) from the General Social Survey (GSS). Active travel episodes are characterized by mode, with walking being part of every cycle and bicycling starting in 1992. The attributes of active trips are the types of locations of origins and destinations, the duration of trips, and episode weights for expanding the trips to population-wide estimates. Based on the year of the survey, a variety of locations are coded. In earlier cycles, these include home, work or school, and other's home, whereas in later cycles these are augmented with locations such as grocery stores, restaurants, outdoor destinations, and others. The geographical resolution includes the province and whether the episode was in an urban or rural setting.

Although mode switching caused by COVID-19 is an important travel behavior question in the Global North, countries in the Global South, particularly South Asia, have yet to adequately identify how transportation systems and travel behavior have evolved due to the pandemic. To contribute to this question, this study explored changes in the use frequency of the most common non-active sustainable alternatives in Bangladesh, namely buses and rickshaws. By emphasizing attitudes and perceptions along with sociodemographic characteristics, this study contributed to the understanding of how different factors influence individuals’ shifts in the usage frequency of buses and rickshaws in Bangladesh. Our study suggested that in general, buses have lost more ridership than rickshaws. Findings from a multivariate ordinal model suggested that the middle-income group had reduced their bus use frequency, and the low-income group had increased their rickshaw use frequency during the first wave of the pandemic. Also, there could be a possible reduction in bus use in the post-lockdown and post-pandemic periods if the risk perception continues to remain in the public consciousness. Moreover, those who cared less about the social distancing measures and had confidence in their immune system had increased their bus use frequency during the pandemic. Compared to bus use frequency, there have been fewer changes in rickshaw use frequency during the pandemic, indicating that rickshaws had become a comparatively more viable mode during the pandemic. Based on the findings, the study discussed the policy implications of keeping buses and rickshaws as viable, sustainable transport modes in the post-pandemic period.

Active school travel (AST) is promoted in many jurisdictions, including Ontario, Canada, where there is provincial support for school travel planning (STP) efforts. Two pillars of school travel plans in the province are education and encouragement. For these pillars to stand, relevant stakeholders must be cognizant of and understand the issues and stakes. For this reason, we deem it important to understand how AST is communicated. In this research we adopt framing analysis to investigate the ways in which various organizations communicate to the public around AST. A frame is a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to a particular phenomenon, and thus helps to set the parameters for conversations about policy. In the case of AST, framing can influence what policy alternatives are perceived as available by children, parents, and their wider communities. The research is supported by natural language processing techniques applied to publicly available documents from Ontario stakeholders involved in school travel planning. We then compare the findings from these documents to a selection of academic studies on AST. We conclude that framing of AST in Ontario is mostly empirical-scientific in style, and largely in agreement with academic research on AST. However, it is essentially conservative and does not challenge the status quo of motorized travel. Furthermore, the frames tend to download responsibility for change to households, which limits the scope of policy alternatives by keeping collective action out of the frame.

Due to a change in capital funding formula, many school boards across the Province of Ontario engaged in Accommodation Reviews to rationalize the supply of school capacity. This process led to numerous school closures and raised important policy questions regarding the economic value of a school in terms of its capitalization into property values and, by extension, how the closure of a school might affect local neighborhoods. To explore these questions, this research uses spatial hedonic methods to estimate the implicit value of accessibility to schools in the City of Hamilton, Ontario. Spatial Durbin model results provide evidence of a significant negative correlation between distance to schools and housing prices in the Canadian context. This suggests that accessibility to schools is capitalized into property values and that the closure of a neighborhood school may result in potentially significant losses of economic value in communities.

Children are often overlooked in transportation decision-making processes, which typically prioritize adult needs and capacities. Adult-exclusive modes (motor vehicles) limit children's independent accessibility as they create traffic danger. The objective of this study is to estimate children's (aged 8-12) walking accessibility to child-relevant destinations when traffic danger is accounted for. Accessibility to child-relevant destinations is estimated without taking into account traffic danger and when traffic danger is considered. The results find that due to traffic danger, children's walking accessibility is estimated to be reduced by at least 75 %. When traffic danger is accounted for, the median value for access to public transport is 0 and social destinations is 1. Children's accessibility is likely considerably reduced by the danger imposed on them by adult-exclusive modes, motor vehicles, highlighting an environmental injustice. The tool can be used to target interventions to limit traffic danger to facilitate children's independent mobility.

Place-based accessibility measures communicate the potential interaction with opportunities at a zone that populations can access. Recent research has explored the implications of how opportunities are counted by different accessibility methods. In conventional measures, opportunities are multiply counted if more than one zone offers access to the same opportunity. This multi-count of opportunities leads to values of accessibility that are difficult to interpret. A possible solution to enhance the meaning-making of accessibility results is by constraining the calculations to match a known quantity. This ensures all zonal values sum up to a predetermined quantity (i.e., the total number of opportunities). In this way, each value can be meaningfully related to this total. A recent effort that implements this solution is spatial availability, a singly-constrained accessibility measure. In this paper, we extend spatial availability for use in the case of multiple modes or more generally, heterogeneous population segments with distinct travel behaviors. After deriving a multimodal version of spatial availability, we proceed to illustrate its features using a synthetic example. We then apply it to an empirical example of low emission zones in Madrid, Spain. We conclude with suggestions for future research and its use in evaluating policy interventions.

The high penetration of e-activities (e-working, e-shopping, e-leisure) has empowered people to overcome spacetime constraints in daily routines, and this trend is growing. Accordingly, new knowledge is sorely needed to incorporate e-activities into accessibility planning and to define new conceptualizations, methods, and quantifiers that recognize digital and in-person accessibility in real life. This paper introduces the framework of "augmented accessibility" and identifies space-time thresholds in which e-activities are more competitive than in-person activities. By being aware of these thresholds, specific policies could be adopted for encouraging people to save travel time and allocate it to reach other in-person destinations, thereby increasing their overall spatial accessibility. At methodological level, time geography concepts and elasticity analysis are combined, estimating space-time thresholds for six simulated spatial settings: from polycentric and compact cases to sprawled and monocentric cases. The results indicate that e-activities are more competitive in sprawled settings and emphasize the relevance of travel directionality (from opportunity hubs to low-density places) for retaining high spatial accessibility levels and increased travel distances. The social and policy implications of space-time thresholds are discussed for each simulated spatial setting by estimating and comparing critical travel distances for different transport modes. The paper closes by discussing aspects related to practical operationalization of the proposed framework, its communicability, interpretability, and usability.

Identifying market segments can improve the fit and performance of hedonic price models. In this paper, we present a novel approach to market segmentation based on the use of machine learning techniques. Concretely, we propose a two-stage process. In the first stage, classification trees with interactive basis functions are used to identify non-orthogonal and non-linear submarket boundaries. The market segments that result are then introduced in a spatial econometric model to obtain hedonic estimates of the implicit prices of interest. The proposed approach is illustrated with a reproducible example of three major Spanish real estate markets. We conclude that identifying market sub-segments using the approach proposed is a relatively simple and demonstrate the potential of the proposed modelling strategy to produce better models and more accurate predictions.

This article presents an open data product with large geo-referenced micro-data sets of 2018 real estate listings in Spain. These data were originally published on the idealista.com real estate website. The observations were obtained for the three largest cities in Spain: Madrid (n = 94,815 observations), Barcelona (n = 61,486 observations), and Valencia (n = 33,622 observations). The data sets include the coordinates of properties (latitude and longitude), asking prices of each listed dwelling, and several variables of indoor characteristics. The listings were enriched with official information from the Spanish cadastre (e.g., building material quality) plus other relevant geographical features, such as distance to urban points of interest. Along with the real estate listings, the data product also includes neighborhood boundaries for each city. The data product is offered as a fully documented R package and is available for scientific and educational purposes, particularly for geo-spatial studies.

This paper presents the results of a scoping review concerning the state of knowledge with respect to the impacts of COVID-19 on daily personal travel in the Global South. Based on the available literature in the Global South, the paper aims to: (1) provide an overview of the current state of knowledge regarding the personal daily travel of different socio-economic and demographic groups during COVID-19; (2) synthesise the literature to explore the needs of the different socio-economic and demographic groups; and (3) identify groups who received less attention in transportation research in the Global South so far. The paper reviewed 47 studies and found that while investigating personal travel during COVID-19, the most explored socio-economic and demographic attributes were sex, age, income, occupation and educational qualifications. Some regional differences were evident in terms of mode choice during COVID-19. Through the review, it is also noticeable that none of the studies explored LGBTQ+ communities’ and individuals with disabilities’ transportation needs and challenges and how COVID-19 has impacted their personal travel. Other overlooked socio-economic and demographic groups in the Global South whose personal travel during COVID-19 and the post-pandemic period needs investigation are migrant and seasonal workers, children and youths, ethnic minorities, racial minorities, religious minorities, linguistically diverse individuals, indigenous individuals, and individuals residing in rural areas.

Research on children’s destinations has primarily focused on school trips, yet their lives are more than that. Different destinations contribute to children’s quality of life in different ways, but this is rarely examined. For our research, focus groups were conducted with different stakeholders to better understand non-school destinations, namely by identifying common, daily, and informal destinations and perceptions of how they relate to children’s well-being. Online focus group discussions were conducted with children (aged 8–12), parents (with children aged 7–13), and experts from different cities across Canada in May and June 2023, to obtain diverse opinions about children’s destinations. The analysis was conducted based on a prior review to categorize children’s destinations, identify informal destinations, green and grey places, and the relation between those destinations to children’s well-being. Discussions with parents, children, and experts highlighted the diversity of destinations relevant to children. Leisure destinations were one of the most mentioned in the discussions. Spaces without specific rules or structures were identified by experts as beneficial for children’s cognitive, social, physical, and psychological health. Parents mentioned primarily formal places, whereas children and experts mentioned primarily informal ones. Green destinations were more associated with physical well-being, though children dominantly associated green destinations with psychological well-being as well. All groups dominantly associated grey-type destinations with social and cognitive well-being. Using these results, urban planners can develop strategies to improve children’s access to their daily destinations that support their well-being.

natural.In fact, the concept of an alibi exists in numerous judicial systems in the world, albeit sometimes with different roots (e.g., coartada, in Spanish, means the act of narrowing, i.e., the set of locations where someone could have been).The idea remains the same, and is rooted in some fundamental principles, to wit:• Firstly, a person cannot be here and there at the same time.• Secondly, there are limits as to how fast a person can move.• And thirdly, a person exists in a continuum, without leaps of non-existence: Mr.Nicol did not cease to exist at one moment (e.g., at the gate), and started to exist again at another (e.g., at his interrogation).

This paper describes and visualises the data contained within the {TTS2016R} data package created in R, the statistical computing and graphics language. {TTS2016R} contains home-to-work commute information for the Greater Golden Horseshoe area in Canada retrieved from the 2016 Transportation Tomorrow Survey (TTS). Included are all Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZ), the number of people who are employed full-time per TAZ, the number of jobs per TAZ, the count of origin destination (OD) pairs and trips by mode per origin TAZ, calculated car travel time from TAZ OD centroid pairs and associated spatial boundaries to link TAZ to the Canadian Census. To illustrate how this information can be analysed to understand patterns in commuting, we estimate a distance-decay curve (i.e. impedance function) for the region. {TTS2016R} is a growing open data product built on R infrastructure that allows for the immediate access of home-to-work commuting data alongside complimentary objects from different sources. The package will continue expanding with additions by the authors and the community at-large by requests in the future. {TTS2016R} can be freely explored and downloaded in the associated Github repository where the documentation and code involved in data creation, manipulation and all open data products are detailed.

Accessibility indicators are widely used in transportation, urban and healthcare planning, among many other applications. These measures are weighted sums of reachable opportunities from a given origin, conditional on the cost of movement, and are estimates of the potential for spatial interaction. Over time, various proposals have been forwarded to improve their interpretability: one of those methodological additions have been the introduction of competition. In this paper we focus on competition, but first demonstrate how a widely used measure of accessibility with congestion fails to properly match the opportunity-seeking population. We then propose an alternative formulation of accessibility with competition, a measure we call spatial availability. This measure relies on proportional allocation balancing factors (friction of distance and population competition) that are equivalent to imposing a single constraint on conventional gravity-based accessibility. In other words, the proportional allocation of opportunities results in a spatially available opportunities value which is assigned to each origin that, when all origin values are summed, equals the total number of opportunities in the region. We also demonstrate how Two-Stage Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) methods are equivalent to spatial availability and can be reconceptualized as singly-constrained accessibility. To illustrate the application of spatial availability and compare it to other relevant measures, we use data from the 2016 Transportation Tomorrow Survey of the Greater Golden Horseshoe area in southern Ontario, Canada. Spatial availability is an important contribution since it clarifies the interpretation of accessibility with competition and paves the way for future applications in equity analysis (e.g., spatial mismatch, opportunity benchmarking, policy intervention scenario analysis).

Immobility is known to impact health and well-being by reducing social contact, activity participation, and changing time use patterns. These unfortunate effects mostly affect specific demographic segments, including older adults, low income families, people who face disabilities, and those living in conflict zones. Emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic mandated or strongly recommended limitations to mobility, thereby causing this condition for segments of the public not usually characterized by high levels of immobility. In the context of the pandemic, reduced mobility was the non-pharmaceutical intervention of choice, and the evidence suggests that it helped to keep incidences of the disease from exploding. On the other hand, there is also a need to understand how mobility restrictions may have had incidental impacts, including to well-being, in population groups that have not been studied from this perspective before. In this spirit, the present paper uses the items of the Satisfaction with Life Scale to investigate how aspects of well-being changed during the pandemic, using a sample of 400 college and university students in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Analysis is based on multivariate ordered models and the results suggest that being less mobile, less active, and changes in activity time use due COVID-19 had an impact on the satisfaction with life of students. The detrimental effect was more marked for males and students from low-income households. Additionally, perceptions of residential characteristics and sense of belonging also correlate with satisfaction with life in the period under study.