Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
transport energy cost. Such transport issues have received increasing attention
in transport studies for a large regions. For instance, in popular journey to
work studies, developing an understanding of the broad relationship between a
worker's residence to their locale of work and commuting behaviours in a
given region, its variation over space and time and how this differs according
to industry sector and travel mode are central to the search for solutions to
transport problems.
2.1. The Need for GIS
GIS techniques that are capable of tracking changes in the spatial
dimension of regional mobility can help identify the ever varying nature of
transport demand. The geographical dimension of journey to work activities
has received significant attention over time (see for example Mogridge, 1979;
O'Connor, 1978, 1980; Gipps et al., 1997; Horner and Murray, 2003; O'Kelly
et al., 2005; Titheridge and Hall, 2006; Sakanishi, 2006; Sultana and Weber,
2007; Mees et al., 2008). The application of GIS to study the spatial dynamics
of commuting has been applied in a variety of instances. An early work
provided by Mogridge (1979) who used the Euclidean distance analysis
between traffic zones to investigate journey to work lengths in London. This is
followed by Wachs et al., (1993) who utilized GIS-based techniques to track
changes in wokers' home and work locations in California. Other GIS
applications include Christopher et al., (1995) spatially explored the direction
of travels for 9 counties in Chicago. Results indicated minor change in
directional biases over the 20 year study period despite significant regional
growth and urban decentralisation. The more recent GIS operations was given
by Vandersmissen et al., (2003) to analyse changes in worker travel time and
distance for Québec City using disaggregate household travel survey data.
Horner (2007) investigated urban form and transport change in Tallahasse,
Florida using both global and local measures of transport change and
relationship between land use and transport patterns. At a regional level, many
of these studies have also used higher levels of aggregation in census and
travel survey data.
This section demonstrates a series of GIS applications that it is possible to
model regional transport patterns, even at a disaggregate scale. Their capacity
to assess detailed transport flows and the use of transport networks, and
manipulate the aggregate transport data into a meaningful geo-visualization. In
this section, the journey to work datasets were used to conduct GIS analysis of
