01156936

Component

Commuting distances and the complexity of commuter flows have increased steadily over the years, effecting transport emission and urban sprawl. This paper measures and visualizes the explicit spatial impact of commuting. Based on human activity space and market area concepts, three measures of commuting regions, average commuting distance (I), commuting intensity (II), and confidence interval ellipse (III) are developed. A commuting region is not static. It changes over the years. The determinants of spatial change of commuting regions are modeled across all communities of Switzerland to evaluate the three measures. To better understand the complex commuting structure, the spatial effects of in-commuting and out-commuting are analyzed separately. The independent variables of the two explorative models are organized into socio-demographic characteristics of the residential community, economic characteristics of the workplace, and morphological structure. The resulting effects vary between decades and commuting direction, mainly influenced by spatial structure, the distance to the nearest urban center, large, medium or small, and by the neighboring communities. This approach contributes to a better understanding of the behavior of a functional region, a delimitation approach that is becoming more important next to traditional administrative regional boundaries.

01147878

10-2024

English

19p

2010

Transportation Research Board 89th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (22) ; Tables (4)

Commuters; Social factors; Spatial analysis; Traffic flow; Trip length; Urban sprawl

Sociodemographics

Switzerland

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2010 Paper #10-2024

TRIS, TRB

Jan 25 2010 10:56AM