Name: Human-centered mobility flow classification: Examining the difference between travel patterns of men and women
Start: 2025-05-28T11:10:00-0400
End: 2025-05-28T11:30:00-0400

Welcome to CTRF’s 60th Annual Conference! Enjoy Ottawa

Wednesday May 28, 2025 11:10am - 11:30am EDT

Desmarais 1160

There is growing need for human-centered geographical methods to understand how urban systems, like transportation, are differently experienced by different urban inhabitants and how those differences are imprinted in the territory. Under this premise, this paper presents a method for a human-centered classification of urban transport flows, focused on gender. The objective is to unveil if men and women produce distinct spatial patterns to inform gender-equity aware transport planning. Using an origin-destination survey for the metropolitan area of Montreal, it applies a Hierarchical Link Clustering algorithm to produce communities of flows with similar characteristics based on geography, distance and number of trips. Then a K-means classification is applied to the resulting communities to derive movement types. Results show a distinct geographical pattern between genders, where women move predominantly in round, local types of communities, whereas men tend to move in elongated, movement types of communities. These results can be used to introduce more targeted interventions to transport systems, and further, it can be applied to other dimensions of equity beyond gender.

Speakers

Martin Trépanier

Full Professor, Polytechnique Montréal and CIRRELT

Martin Trépanier is a civil engineer and professor at the department of mathematics and industrial engineering of École Polytechnique de Montréal, an engineering school affiliated to the Université de Montréal. He is the titular of the Chair in the transformation of transportation... Read More →