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Movement patterns of intra-urban goods/things and the ways they differ from human mobility and traffic flow patterns have seldom been explored due to data access and methodological limitations, especially from systemic and long timescale perspectives. However, urban logistics big data are increasingly available, enabling unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions to this issue. This research proposes an analytical framework for exploring intra-urban goods movement patterns by integrating spatial analysis, network analysis and spatial interaction analysis. Using daily urban logistics big data (over 10 million orders) provided by the largest online logistics company in Hong Kong (GoGoVan) from 2014 to 2016, we analyzed two spatial characteristics (displacement and direction) of urban goods movement. Results showed that the distribution of goods displaceFower law or exponential distribution of human mobility trends. The origin–destination flows of goods were used to build a spatially embedded network, revealing that Hong Kong became increasingly connected through intra-urban freight movement. Finally, spatial interaction characteristics were revealed using a fitting gravity model. Distance lacked substantial influence on the spatial interaction of goods movement. These findings have policy implications to intra-urban logistics and urban transport planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As advanced intelligent transportation systems become more prevalent with the use of cyber-physical systems, information and communications technologies, and Big Data, there is an increasing need to improve the process of technology evaluation. Existing procedures typically involve pure computer simulations followed by expensive and restricted field studies. We propose a more integrated solution: using mobile devices to mimic the algorithms within actual technologies so that advanced technological design alternatives can be cheaply evaluated on the field. A process architecture is developed for a tablet-based cyber-physical surrogate system. The tablet devices can mimic many equipment packages and can transmit data, location, text, and video between themselves and a central facility. Measures of effectiveness are identified for evaluating these surrogate systems in field trials. Three surrogate systems are implemented as field experiments conducted on the Ryerson University campus in Toronto, ON. The experiments? measures of effectiveness are deviation from a schedule, total process time, and person counts-applicable to many real world transportation problems. The experiments demonstrate how we can quantitatively measure these technologies from the field: an average improvement of 64% in cumulative schedule deviation for the "Uniform Arrivals" experiment, 27% in the total process time for the "Scavenger Hunt" experiment, but a poor mimic error when evaluating the LIVEGAUGE stationary sensor. An open-source online repository for these surrogate systems is created and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rise of urban Big Data has made it possible to use demand data at an operational level, which is necessary to directly measure the economic welfare of operational strategies and events. GIS is the primary visualization tool in this regard, but most current methods are based on scalar objects that lack directionality and rate of change – key attributes of travel. The few studies that do consider field-based time geography have largely looked at vector fields for individuals, not populations. A population-based vector field is proposed for visualizing time-geographic demand momentum. The field is estimated using a vector kernel density generated from observed trajectories of a sample population. By representing transport systems as vector fields that share the same time–space domain, demand can be projected onto the systems to visualize relationships between them. This visualization tool offers a powerful approach to visually correlate changes in the systems with changes in demand, as demonstrated in a case study of the Greater Toronto Area using data from the 2006 and 2011 Transportation Tomorrow Surveys. As a result, it is now possible to measure in real time the effects of disasters on the economic welfare of a population, or quantify the effects of operational strategies and designs on the behavioural activity patterns of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A city is a complex system that never sleeps; it constantly changes, and its internal mobility (people, vehicles, goods, information, etc.) continues to accelerate and intensify. These changes and mobility vary in terms of the attributes of the city, such as space, time and cultural affiliation, which characterise to some extent how the city functions. Traditional urban studies have successfully modelled the 'low-frequency city' and have provided solutions such as urban planning and highway design for long-term urban development. Nevertheless, the existing urban studies and theories are insufficient to model the dynamics of a city's intense mobility and rapid changes, so they cannot tackle short-term urban problems such as traffic congestion, real-time transport scheduling and resource management. The advent of information and communication technology and big data presents opportunities to model cities with unprecedented resolution. Since 2018, a paradigm shift from modelling the 'low-frequency city' to the so-called 'high-frequency city' has been introduced, but hardly any research investigated methods to estimate a city's frequency. This work aims to propose a framework for the identification and analysis of indicators to model and better understand the concept of a high-frequency city in a systematic manner. The methodology for this work was based on a content analysis-based review, taking into account specific criteria to ensure the selection of indicator sets that are consistent with the concept of the frequency of cities. Twenty-two indicators in five groups were selected as indicators for a high-frequency city, and a framework was proposed to assess frequency at both the intra-city and inter-city levels. This work would serve as a pilot study to further illuminate the ways that urban policy and operations can be adjusted to improve the quality of city life in the context of a smart city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public transport plays an important role in developing sustainable cities. A better understanding of how different public transit modes (bus, metro, and taxi) interact with each other will provide better sustainable strategies to transport and urban planners. However, most existing studies are either limited to small-scale surveys or focused on the identification of general interaction patterns during times of regular traffic. Transient demographic changes in a city (i.e., many people moving out and in) can lead to significant changes in such interaction patterns and provide a useful context for better investigating the changes in these patterns. Despite that, little has been done to explore how such interaction patterns change and how they are linked to the built environment from the perspective of transient demographic changes using urban big data. In this paper, the tap-in-tap-out smart card data of bus/metro and taxi GPS trajectory data before and after the Chinese Spring Festival in Shenzhen, China, are used to explore such interaction patterns. A time-series clustering method and an elasticity change index (ECI) are adopted to detect the changing transit mode patterns and the underlying dynamics. The findings indicate that the interactions between different transit modes vary over space and time and are competitive or complementary in different parts of the city. Both ordinary least-squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models with built environment variables are used to reveal the impact of changes in different transit modes on ECIs and their linkage with the built environment. The results of this study will contribute to the planning and design of multi-modal transport services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]