Spatial Analysis of Individual Activity Locations and Concentration Levels in Calgary

Personal travel information available from household surveys helps urban transportation planners to better capture the real world situation at a much-detailed level. Individuals have a set of periodic activities and the resources that satisfy these activities are distributed across space and time. Individuals must distribute their limited time among these activities, and transportation is used to trade time for space changing. In this study, ArcGIS is used to analyze the time and location choices of several Calgarian activities, such as work, home, education and others. In particular, GIS is used to show activity locations and concentration levels over different time of the day, and visualize individual trip chains. Study results clearly show that the location choices of the work, home, and education are consistent with underlying land use patterns of desired zones. And time of the day analysis also indicates that work-shift results in significant changes in activity concentrations over different land use zones due to their own natures. Mapping of individual trip chains also provides evidences that daily travel patterns are much more complicated than those having been modeled in the traditional aggregated models.