Considering context and dynamics: A classification of transit-orientated development for New York City

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is a widely recognised planning strategy for encouraging the use of mass and active transport over other less sustainable modes. Typological approaches to TOD areas can be utilised to either retrospectively or prospectively assist urban planners with evidence-based information on the delivery or monitoring of TOD. However, existing studies aiming to create TOD typologies overwhelmingly concentrate input measures around three dimensions of: density, diversity and design; which might be argued as not effectively capturing a fuller picture of context. Moreover, such emphasis on static attributes overlooks the importance of human mobility patterns that are signatures of the dynamics of cities. This study proposes a framework to address this research gap by enhancing a conventional TOD typology through the addition of measures detailing the spatiotemporal dynamics of activity at transit stations; implemented for the selected case study area, New York City

Inferring Social Functions Available in the Metro Station Area from Passengers’ Staying Activities in Smart Card Data

The function of a metro station area is vital for city planners to consider when establishing a context-aware Transit-Oriented Development policy around the station area. However, the functions of metro station areas are hard to infer using the static land use distribution and other traditional survey datasets. In this paper, we propose a method to infer the functions occurring around the metro station catchment areas according to the patterns of staying activities derived from smart card data. We first define the staying activities by the spatial and temporal constraints of the two consecutive alighting and boarding records from the individual travel profile. Then we cluster and label the whole staying activities by considering the features of duration, frequency, and start time. By analyzing the percentage of different types of aggregated activities happening around each metro station, we cluster and explore the functions of the metro station area. Taking Wuhan as a case study, we analyze the results of Wuhan metro systems and discuss the similarities and differences between the functions and the land use distribution around the station area. The results show that although there exist some agreements, there is also a gap between the human activities and the land uses around the station area. These findings could give us deeper insight into how people act around the stations by metro systems, which will ultimately benefit the urban planning and policy development