Encouraging parents to adopt more sustainable commuting modes remains a persistent challenge for transportation planners. A critical yet often overlooked barrier is the impact of "service trips", such as driving children to school, on parental mobility choices. These trips, driven by time constraints and logistical demands, frequently lead to increased car ownership. This, in turn, reinforces car use for commuting and other daily activities, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of car dependency.
Using data from Origin-Destination travel surveys conducted in the Montreal and Quebec regions, this presentation examines the complex relationship between school-related service trips and parental transportation behaviors. It highlights the potential of improving transportation options for children to travel independently to school as a lever to reduce car dependency among parents. The analysis estimates the positive impacts of such changes, including shifts in mode share, reductions in kilometers traveled by car, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the study explores the broader benefits, such as improved health outcomes for children and enhanced family mobility flexibility.
This research underscores the need for integrated planning approaches that address the role of school trips in shaping mobility patterns, paving the way for more sustainable urban transportation systems.
Encouraging greater public transport usage and reducing automobile dependency requires making public transport systems more competitive and appealing. To achieve this, transit networks must address the mobility needs of diverse population segments with varying travel needs throughout the day. Providing a high-quality transit system requires an in-depth understanding of users, their habits, and their route-choice decision-making process.
This presentation focuses on the various types of travelers among public transit users when it comes to choosing which route to use to travel between two points. Decisions regarding route choice are closely tied to factors such as age, gender, occupation, and household characteristics. Additionally, some users may prioritize minimizing walking distance, while others may seek to reduce the number of transfers or minimise total travel time. Using observed transit routes from an Origin-Destination travel survey of Montreal, we develop a typology of traveler based on transit route choice strategy.
This approach sheds light on user preferences and travel habits, enabling transit planners to design systems that better align with the needs and expectations of diverse traveler groups.
In most metropolitan areas, a diverse array of transportation modes is available to travelers, each serving specific travel needs and shaping distinctive usage patterns. This research focuses on analyzing these patterns across a wide spectrum of transportation options in the Greater Montreal Area. While traditional transport surveys are valuable for modeling individual behaviors during an average weekday, they fail to capture the variability in the use of different transportation modes over time.
This study addresses this gap by leveraging a diverse set of operational data from transportation systems and services. Clustering approaches are applied to identify typical daily and weekly usage patterns. Six relatively independent data streams are analyzed: vehicle road counts, bicycle counters, transit validation records for subway and bus, GPS data for taxis, BIXI bikesharing usage data, and Communauto carsharing data. These datasets collectively cover a common area in the central part of the Island of Montreal for the years 2019 to 2023.
The four years of continuous data enable an analysis of how usage patterns have evolved over time, offering insights into shifts in mobility trends. Additionally, this research highlights the methodological challenges of integrating multiple data streams to model usage at varying spatial and temporal resolutions.
The urban street sits at the centre of policy attention looking to redress the injustice of the car domination of the urban landscape, which contributes to unhealthy cities, pollution, high rates of fatal crashes between automobiles and other travellers, and other maladies. Much of the contestation around the street focuses on the space allocated to different transport infrastructures, which overwhelmingly is dedicated to cars. While some recent research has begun to closely examine the distribution of street space to transport infrastructures, another under-explored angle is dynamic street space consumption: how much space does a trip occupy in the city, over time, considering movement dynamics. In this paper, we use mobility survey data to analyze how the street space used by different travellers and households varies according to trip, personal, and household characteristics. In this way, we examine inequities in how people use city space according to travel mode, gender, race, income, and household composition. In addition to the spatial dimension, we also consider the carbon emissions of trips, to understand how space consumption and carbon emissions are related, and how different personal and household characteristics relate to the environmental cost of travel.
