Minimum commuting distance as a spatial characteristic in a non-monocentric urban system : the case of Flanders

This paper focuses on regional variations in commuting trip lengths by calculating minimum (required) commuting distances, along with excess commuting rates. The study contributes to the excess commuting research framework from a regional perspective, both by stressing the specific characteristics of urban networks with overlapping commute areas, and by putting forward an alternative method for calculating spatially disaggregated values. A case study in the north of Belgium shows that large variations in minimum commuting distances occur. This in turn identifies to a large extent opportunities for shrinking commuting distances by influences such as rising fuel prices, compact urban planning, extreme congestion or dissuasive traffic policies

Modelling potential movement in constrained travel environments using rough space-time prisms

The widespread adoption of location-aware technologies (LATs) has afforded analysts new opportunities for efficiently collecting trajectory data of moving individuals. These technologies enable measuring trajectories as a finite sample set of time-stamped locations. The uncertainty related to both finite sampling and measurement errors makes it often difficult to reconstruct and represent a trajectory followed by an individual in space-time. Time geography offers an interesting framework to deal with the potential path of an individual in between two sample locations. Although this potential path may be easily delineated for travels along networks, this will be less straightforward for more nonnetwork-constrained environments. Current models, however, have mostly concentrated on network environments on the one hand and do not account for the spatiotemporal uncertainties of input data on the other hand. This article simultaneously addresses both issues by developing a novel methodology to capture potential movement between uncertain space-time points in obstacle-constrained travel environments