A modification of the time-geographic framework to support temporal flexibility in ‘fixed’ activities

Charleux, Laure

doi:10.1080/13658816.2015.1009464

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…There are only travel time uncertainties about whether the transport services will be able to follow the time tables according to the schedule. This would be equivalent to considering the boarding of passengers at public transport stops as spatially fixed and temporally flexible activities (Charleux, 2015). As a result, some concepts from time geography such as space-time prism and potential path area might not be directly applicable to the study of conventional public transport systems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the time geography of public transport networks with the gtfs2gps package

Pereira¹,

Andrade²,

Vieira³

2022

Preprint

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The creation of the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) in the mid-2000s provided a new data format for cities to organize and share digital information on their public transport systems. GTFS feeds store geolocated data on public transport networks, including information on routes, stops, timetables, and service levels. The GTFS standard is now widely adopted by thousands of transport authorities and a wide variety of software applications for different purposes, including trip planning, timetable creation and accessibility analysis. Yet, there is still a lack of tools to parse GTFS data in a way that allows one to analyze the complex spatial and temporal patterns of public transport systems. This paper presents gtfs2gps, a new computational tool to easily process GTFS data that allows one to analyze the space-time trajectories of public transport vehicles at fine spatial and temporal resolutions. gtfs2gps is an open-source R package that employs parallel computing to convert GTFS feeds from relational text files into a data table format similar to GPS records with the timestamps of vehicles in every single trip. This paper explains the package functionalities and demonstrates how gtfs2gps can be used to articulate key concepts in time geography to explore and visualize the spatial and temporal patterns of public transport networks. The paper is accompanied by a computational notebook in R Markdown that allows one to easily reproduce the results in this paper or even replicate the analysis and data visualizations for other contexts where GTFS data is available. Given the widespread use of GTFS by transport agencies, gtfs2gps opens new possibilities for researchers to examine the time geography of public transport systems in urban areas across the globe.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the time geography of public transport networks with the gtfs2gps package

Pereira¹,

Andrade²,

Vieira³

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There are only travel time uncertainties about whether the transport services will be able to follow the timetables according to the schedule. This would be equivalent to considering the boarding of passengers at public transport stops as spatially fixed and temporally flexible activities (Charleux, 2015). As a result, some concepts from time geography such as spacetime prism and potential path area might not be directly applicable to the study of conventional public transport systems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the time geography of public transport networks with the gtfs2gps package

Pereira

Andrade²,

Vieira³

2022

J Geogr Syst

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The creation of the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) in the mid-2000s provided a new data format for cities to organize and share digital information on their public transport systems. GTFS feeds store geolocated data on public transport networks, including information on routes, stops, timetables, and service levels. The GTFS standard is now widely adopted by thousands of transport authorities and a wide variety of software applications for different purposes, including trip planning, timetable creation and accessibility analysis. Yet, there is still a lack of tools to parse GTFS data when the objective is to analyze the complex spatial and temporal patterns of public transport systems. This paper presents {gtfs2gps}, a new general-purpose computational tool to easily process static GTFS data that allows one to analyze the space-time trajectories of public transport vehicles at fine spatial and temporal resolutions. {gtfs2gps} is an open-source R package that employs parallel computing to convert GTFS feeds from relational text files into a trajectory data table, similar to GPS records, with the timestamps of vehicles in every trip. This paper explains the package functionalities and demonstrates how {gtfs2gps} can be used to articulate key concepts in time-geography to explore and visualize the spatial and temporal patterns of public transport networks. We also present a case study looking at how {gtfs2gps} can be used to examine socioeconomic and spatial-temporal inequalities in access to public transport, providing key information to monitor cities' progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper is accompanied by a computational notebook in R Markdown to support reproducibility of the results in this paper, and to replicate the analysis for other contexts where GTFS data are available. Given the widespread use of GTFS, {gtfs2gps} opens new possibilities for researchers to examine the time-geography of public transport systems in urban areas across the globe.

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“…The RI can be identified as the time interval with the occurrence equal to or larger than the threshold. However, defining thresholds that can characterize the repetitive intervals is challenging due to the uncertainty or inherent flexibility of activities in a person’s everyday schedule (Schwanen et al 2008 ; Charleux 2015 ). Hence, we define threshold from a data-driven perspective.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, Kuijpers et al ( 2010 ) proposed the ‘anchor region’ with a probability distribution on the possible locations of anchor points to represent the variation of anchors’ spatial locations. For the temporal aspect, Charleux ( 2015 ) modified the temporal attribute of an anchor by using the earliest starting and latest ending times with a duration. These analytical models can perform more realistic modeling of anchored activities that allow some flexibility in their definitions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personalizing the dichotomy of fixed and flexible activities in everyday life: deriving prism anchors from GPS-enabled survey data

Zhang

Song

et al. 2022

Transportation

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Space–time prism is a fundamental concept in time geography that can model an individual’s accessibility to resources under space–time constraints. A prism anchor is often defined by work, school, or home activity with a fixed location and schedule. Trips and other activities are relatively flexible and scheduled between prism anchors. This fixity-flexibility dichotomy may not capture the increasing complexity of human mobility behaviors or variations among individuals. Recent developments in location-aware technologies allow us to collect person-level mobility data with detailed space–time paths and contextual information. This article develops methods to extract prism anchors from these GPS-based survey data and examines whether home, work, and school activities can always be used to define prism anchors for everyone. To illustrate our methods, we use data collected in Minnesota and Beijing as two study cases. Results in both study cases suggest that not everyone has home, work, or school anchors, and people with the same socio-demographic background tend to have similar anchor types. By deriving home, work, and school anchors, we can better understand how a person’s everyday schedules are governed by home, work, and school and refine person-based accessibility measures.

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A modification of the time-geographic framework to support temporal flexibility in ‘fixed’ activities

Cited by 6 publications

References 29 publications

Exploring the time geography of public transport networks with the gtfs2gps package

Exploring the time geography of public transport networks with the gtfs2gps package

Exploring the time geography of public transport networks with the gtfs2gps package

Personalizing the dichotomy of fixed and flexible activities in everyday life: deriving prism anchors from GPS-enabled survey data

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