Commuting patterns of workers in a village of Barddhaman district, West Bengal

Commuting helps to keep balance between residence and workplace of workers. With growing accessibility and connectivity, the importance of commuting is increasing all over the world. It is becoming a major substitute to migration. In commute-studies, commute-pattern is an important chapter. It highlights commuters’ directions of movement, distance they cover, modes of transport they use, the time they take to commute, etc. Unlike the urban-based commute pattern, commute pattern in rural areas are relatively an under-researched issue. In fact, traditionally rural people are thought to carry a sedentary lifestyle. Using primary data, this study aims to explore the commute patterns of rural workers located in the village of Gandharbapur of Barddhaman district of West Bengal, India. All the commuters were found to be engaged in non-farm work. Commuters stem from two major groups. One group of commuters is accumulated farm-income induced. They possess sufficient agricultural land. Investing their surplus farm-income, they have established non-farm works. The second group of commuters is poverty-driven. They are landless poor or are marginal farmers and to escape poverty, they have slipped into these works. Located beyond the suburban area (Memari being the nearest town), most commuters commute to nearby rural areas. Due to non-availability of public transport, women commute less than men do. Regular-paid government employees commute longer than other workers commute. The article concludes with a summary of findings and recommendations for further research

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Commuting helps to keep balance between residence and workplace of workers. With growing accessibility and connectivity, the importance of commuting is increasing all over the world. It is becoming a major substitute to migration. In commute-studies, commute-pattern is an important chapter. It highlights commuters’ directions of movement, distance they cover, modes of transport they use, the time they take to commute, etc. Unlike the urban-based commute pattern, commute pattern in rural areas are relatively an under-researched issue. In fact, traditionally rural people are thought to carry a sedentary lifestyle. Using primary data, this study aims to explore the commute patterns of rural workers located in the village of Gandharbapur of Barddhaman district of West Bengal, India. All the commuters were found to be engaged in non-farm work. Commuters stem from two major groups. One group of commuters is accumulated farm-income induced. They possess sufficient agricultural land. Investing their surplus farm-income, they have established non-farm works. The second group of commuters is poverty-driven. They are landless poor or are marginal farmers and to escape poverty, they have slipped into these works. Located beyond the suburban area (Memari being the nearest town), most commuters commute to nearby rural areas. Due to non-availability of public transport, women commute less than men do. Regular-paid government employees commute longer than other workers commute. The article concludes with a summary of findings and recommendations for further research

Temporal Trends of Intraurban Commuting in Baton Rouge 1990-2010

Based on the CTPP data 1990-2010, this research analyzes the temporal variability of commuting patterns and efficiency (in both distance and time) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It proposes a simulation-based method to measure commuting by simulating individual resident workers, jobs, and trips between them, in order to mitigate the aggregation error and scale effect that are commonly encountered in existing studies. Specifically, the Monte Carlo simulation approach is adopted to simulate individual resident workers and jobs that were consistent with their spatial distributions across the areal unit (e.g., census tract), and then simulate individual trips that were proportional to the existing journey-to-work trip flows. The results indicate that average commute distance kept climbing between 1990 and 2010, whereas average commute time increased between 1990 and 2000 but then slightly dropped toward 2010. As commuting is a trip linking one’s residence to employment, this research follows the long tradition of using the urban land use pattern, namely the spatial separation between residential housing and job location, to explain the observed commuting pattern. Three land use measures are used: distance from the CBD, jobs to resident workers ratio, and a gravity-based job proximity index. The research finds that these land use measures remained a good predictor of commuting pattern in Baton Rouge over time, and the best model explained up to 90 percent of mean commute distance and about 30 percent of mean commute time. Furthermore, nonspatial factors such as a worker’s socioeconomic attributes also influence commuting. Foremost, income plays an important role in one’s residential choices and thus commuting. This research focuses on the role of wage rates of resident workers in commuting pattern. It is reported that commuting behaviors varied across areas of different wage rates, captured by a convex shape. Initially workers living in more affluent neighborhoods tended to commute more, but those in areas with the highest wage rates retreated for less commuting. This trend remained relatively stable over time. Wasteful (excess) commuting is also examined as the overall commuting efficiency metric for the study area. Wasteful commuting is measured as the proportion of actual commute that is over minimum (optimal) commute when assuming that people could freely swap their homes and jobs in a city. This research identifies two contributors resulting in the miscalculation of wasteful commuting: reporting errors and the use of aggregate zonal data. The former tended to overstate the actual commuting length and led to overestimate wasteful commuting; and the latter (especially the use of large areal unit) led to underestimate wasteful commuting. This research indicates that the percentage of wasteful commuting increased significantly between 1990 and 2000 and stabilized afterward

Modelling spatial interaction patterns in geographic information system

In diploma thesis we analysed several approaches of modelling spatial interaction patterns. We thoroughly tested two common approaches and developed three other methods. The basis for our research was presented by Waldo Tobler (Tobler, 1975). Approaches of modelling and cartographically presenting spatial interactions have been automatized. We used MatLab to develop script tools and perform mathematical computations, while ArcGIS was used to create cartographic materials. In the application of the analysed methods, data on commuters between statistical regions and municipalities of Slovenia for 2011 were used