Big Data and the City: special issue of Built Environment

Special Issue of Built Environment on ‘Big Data and the City’; Volume 42, Number 3, Autumn 2016

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alex/benv

  • Editorial: Big Data, Cities and Herodotus – Batty, Michael
  • Big Data and the City – Batty, Michael
  • From Origins to Destinations: The Past, Present and Future of Visualizing Flow Maps – Claudel, Matthew; Nagel, Till; Ratti, Carlo
  • Towards a Better Understanding of Cities Using Mobility Data – Lenormand, Maxime; Ramasco, José J.
  • Finding Pearls in London’s Oysters – Reades, Jonathan; Zhong, Chen; Manley, ED; Milton, Richard; Batty, Michael
  • A Classification of Multidimensional Open Data for Urban Morphology – Alexiou, Alexandros; Singleton, Alex; Longley, Paul A.
  • User-Generated Big Data and Urban Morphology – Crooks, A.T.; Croitoru, A.; Jenkins, A.; Mahabir, R.; Agouris, P.; Stefanidis, A.
  • Sensing Spatiotemporal Patterns in Urban Areas: Analytics and Visualizations Using the Integrated Multimedia City Data Platform – Thakuriah, Piyushimita; Sila-Nowicka, Katarzyna; Paule, Jorge Gonzalez
  • Playful Cities: Crowdsourcing Urban Happiness with Web Games – Quercia, Daniele
  • Big Data for Healthy Cities: Using Location-Aware Technologies, Open Data and 3D Urban Models to Design Healthier Built Environments – Miller, Harvey J.; Tolle, Kristin
  • Improving the Veracity of Open and Real-Time Urban Data – Mcardle, Gavin; Kitchin, Rob
  • Wise Cities: ‘Old’ Big Data and ‘Slow’ Real Time – Carrera, Fabio
  • Collecting and Visualizing Real-Time Urban Data through City Dashboards –Gray, Steven; O’Brien, Oliver; Hügel, Stephan

Public transit generates new physical activity

Miller HJ, Tribby CP, Brown BB, Smith KR, Werner CM, Wolf J, Wilson L, Oliveira MGS (2015) “Public transit generates new physical activity: Evidence from individual GPS and accelerometer data before and after light rail construction in a neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA,” Health & Place, 26, 8-17. doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2015.08.005

Highlights

  • We track physical activity time before and after construction of a light rail line
  • Study participants wore accelerometers and GPS recorders
  • Changes in physical activity time relate directly to changes in transit use
  • No substitution of transit-related physical activity time for other activity time

Abstract: Poor health outcomes from insufficient physical activity (PA) are a persistent public health issue. Public transit is often promoted for positive influence on PA. Although there is cross-sectional evidence that transit users have higher PA levels, this may be coincidental or shifted from activities such as recreational walking. We use a quasi-experimental design to test if light rail transit (LRT) generated new PA in a neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Participants (n=536) wore Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and accelerometers before (2012) and after (2013) LRT construction. We test within-person differences in individuals’ PA time based on changes in transit usage pre- versus post-intervention. We map transit-related PA to detect spatial clustering of PA around the new transit stops. We analyze within-person differences in PA time based on daily transit use and estimate the effect of daily transit use on PA time controlling for socio-demographic variables. Results suggest that transit use directly generates new PA that is not shifted from other PA. This supports the public health benefits from new high quality public transit such as LRT.

Assessing built environment walkability using activity-space summary measures

Tribby, C.P., Miller, H.J., Brown, B.B., Werner, C.M., & Smith, K.R. (2015). Assessing built environment walkability using activity-space summary measures. Journal Of Transport and Land Use. [Article in Press scheduled for vol. 9 (2016) issue 1 pp. 1–21]  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.2015.625

There is increasing emphasis in fields such as transportation planning and public health on walking as a sustainable form of mobility and a means of achieving recommended physical activity for better health outcomes. A key question is measuring the influence of the built environment on walking to determine environmental modifications that enhance walkability.  However, it is unclear how to aggregate georeferenced walkability measures to geographic units that are meaningful for behavioral analysis.  This paper develops methods for assessing walkability within individual activity spaces: the geographic region accessible to an individual during a given walking trip. Based on objective walkability measures of the street blocks, we use three summary measures for walkability within activity spaces: i) the average walkability score across block segments, ii) the standard deviation, and iii) the network autocorrelation. We assess the method using data from an empirical study of built environment walkability and walking behavior in Salt Lake City, Utah. We visualize these activity-space summary measures to compare walkability among individuals’ trips within their neighborhoods. We also compare summary measures for activity spaces versus Census block groups.

Keywords: Walkability, activity spaces, built environment