Day: 2011-08-12

Accessibility, network structure, and consumers’ destination choice: a GIS analysis of GPS travel data

| David Levinson

Working paper:

Walking areas around a trip destination
Walking areas around a trip destination
  • Huang, Arthur and Levinson, David (2011) Accessibility, network structure, and consumers’ destination choice: a GIS analysis of GPS travel data.

    Anecdotal and empirical evidence has shown that road networks, destination accessibility, and travelers’ choice of destination are closely related. Nevertheless, there have not been systematic investigations linking individuals’ travel behavior and retail clusters at the microscopic level. Based on GPS travel data in the Twin Cities, this paper analyzes the impacts of travelers’ interactions with road network structure and clustering of services at the destination on travelers’ destination choice. A multinomial logit model is adopted. The results reveal that higher accessibility and diversity of services in adjacent zones of a destination are associated with greater attractiveness of a destination. Further, the diversity and accessibility of establishments in an area are often highly correlated. In terms of network structure, a destination with a more circuitous or discontinuous route dampens its appeal. Answering where and why people choose to patronize certain places, our planning, our findings shed light on the design of road networks and clusters from a travel behavior perspective.

    (working paper)

High-speed rail price tag soars again, this time on pace to surpass $60 billion

| David Levinson

San Jose Mercury News High-speed rail price tag soars again, this time on pace to surpass $60 billion : “The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s new cost estimates released Tuesday show the initial stretch of construction between Merced and Bakersfield will cost $10 billion to $13.9 billion depending on how it’s built. Project planners had previously pegged the section at $6.8 billion.
If the cost of the entire project balloons at the same pace as the Central Valley section, the San Francisco-to-Anaheim railroad would cost from $63 billion to $87 billion, similar to what independent analysts have been predicting. And those figures do not include inflation, which could push the final cost toward a staggering $100 billion.”

(Via CP)