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Green Accessibility: Estimating the Environmental Costs of Space-time Prisms for Sustainable Transportation Planning

Song, Ying
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437344275

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Geography.
Accessibility is a concept that describes the ease to reach facilities, resources, and services (collectively called opportunities) within an environment. Increasing mobility (the ease of movement) is one way to achieve greater accessibility. However, mobility may also result in environmental costs such as fossil fuel consumption, emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and other pollutants, and noise pollution. In recent years, a paradigm shift from mobility toward accessibility has emerged as part of a move toward sustainable transportation. A widely applied measure of accessibility is the space-time prism (STP). It demarcates all locations that an individual can be present in space and time while travelling from an origin to a destination given a time budget and maximum travel speed. For accessibility within transportation networks, the network-time prism (NTP) accounts for additional constrains such as one-way restrictions and posted speed limits. Therefore, prism-based accessibility measures are sensitive to socio-economic backgrounds of individuals’ and changes in land-use and transportation system. However, there is an assumption in transportation applications that larger prisms are better since they can provide more accessibility benefits to individuals. This ignores the fact that larger prisms also indicate greater mobility and may hereby bring higher environmental costs. Moreover, existing research have only used the prism boundary to delimit accessible locations and times from inaccessible locations and times, and ignored that locations and times within the prism may not be equally accessible. This theoretical and methodological weakness limits the ability to estimate the potential environmental and social costs associated with STPs and NTPs. This dissertation develops theory and methods to estimate environmental costs of prisms for the use in sustainable transportation planning. It develops an analytical theory for estimating the environmental costs of a prism, specifically, speed-related costs such as fuel consumption and GHG emissions. Three components constitute the theory are: (1) the distribution of visit probabilities that describes the likelihood to visit a location among all accessible locations within the prism, (2) the expected speeds while passing these accessible locations and (3) a function that can estimate the costs of these speed-specified motions. To implement this theory, the dissertation first develops methods for calculating or simulating visit probabilities within STPs and NTPs based on fundamental movement theories, including random walks (RWs), Brownian bridges (BBs), and continuous-time semi-Markov process. Building on these methods, this dissertation then develops methods for estimating the expected speed distribution within NTPs for input into the cost functions, in this case a vehicle emission model named MOVESLite. The dissertation also validates these methods using vehicle trajectory data collected by global positioning system (GPS) in New York City, New York, U.S. and Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. The theory, methods and validations in this dissertation contribute to developing cost-benefit measures for prism-based accessibility and using them in sustainable transportation planning practices. They also contribute to further completing the theoretical framework of time geography by characterizing the properties of prisms’ interior.
Harvey Miller (Advisor)
Morton O'Kelly (Committee Member)
Desheng Liu (Committee Member)
Ningchuan Xiao (Committee Member)
218 p.
Environmental Studies; Geographic Information Science; Geography; Transportation

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Song, Y. (2015). Green Accessibility: Estimating the Environmental Costs of Space-time Prisms for Sustainable Transportation Planning [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437344275

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Song, Ying. Green Accessibility: Estimating the Environmental Costs of Space-time Prisms for Sustainable Transportation Planning . 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437344275.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Song, Ying. "Green Accessibility: Estimating the Environmental Costs of Space-time Prisms for Sustainable Transportation Planning ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437344275

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1437344275
968
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.