On 6 May 2021, TRAIL PhD researcher Lara Zomer will defend her PhD thesis entitled “Unravelling urban wayfinding: Studies on the development of spatial knowledge, activity patterns, and route dynamics of cyclists” at Delft University of Technology. The defence is public, and you are cordially invited to join.
On the occasion of this public defence, TRAIL and TU Delft have set up a seminar on ”Active Modes and the City”. The PhD research conducted is part of the ERC project ALLEGRO which is devoted to developing and empirically underpinning comprehensive behavioural theories, conceptual models and mathematical models to explain and predict the dynamics of pedestrians, cyclists and mixed flows within an urban context. All relevant behavioural levels are investigated, including acquiring spatial knowledge, activity scheduling, route choice and operations. In this webinar results from studies conducted in Sweden and the United States pertaining to travellers’ mental maps and spatial cognition and cyclists perception of the urban environment, respectively.
Registration webinar
Participation is free, registration is required: CLICK HERE.
You will receive a ZOOM invitation on May 4 at the latest.
Programme webinar
Chairman: Oded Cats
17.00 – 17.30 Prof. Yusak Susilo, BOKU, Vienna
Activity locations, activity spaces, and travellers’ familiar areas: quantitative and longitudinal analyses
A mental map is considered a representation of an individual’s spatial cognition. It defines an individual’s choice set of plausible activity locations and influences his/her daily activity-travel patterns. Despite its importance, how individuals’ activity travel patterns interact with their mental maps on a daily basis is largely unknown, mainly due to data, operation, and measurement issues. This presentation will provide results from exploring the dynamics of individuals’ spatial cognitions by observing the changes of respondents’ familiar areas over time, and investigating the possible determinants that constitute respondents’ familiar areas, and how this relates to and overlaps with respondents’ multi-day activity locations selections and also their activity space. Panel data, containing two-week travel diaries and maps of familiar areas, were collected in four different waves over a seven-month period for 55 individuals in Stockholm, Sweden.
Yusak Susilo currently is the Austrian Federal Ministry Endowed Professor in Digitalisation and Automation in Transport and Mobility System at BOKU, Vienna, Austria. His main research interest lies in the intersection between transport and urban planning, transport policy, decision making processes and behavioural interactions modelling. In particular he is interested with the individual’s decision making processes and the interaction of such mechanisms with changes in activity locations, urban form, policies, environments and technology characteristics.
17.30 – 18.00 Prof. Kari Watkins, Georgia Institute of Technology
Usage of instrumented bikes to understand cyclist stress
Following in the path of our Dutch friends, the United States is turning to bicycle infrastructure to encourage this more sustainable mode of travel. However, to date the percentage of trips taken by bicycle in the United States is very low, mostly due to the perception of stress on roadways. Multiple studies have used surveys or other stated preference methods to assess what causes this cyclist stress, however these methods are limited. This presentation describes a series of studies undertaken by the Urban Transportation Information Lab at Georgia Tech using instrumented bicycles and eye-tracking glasses to identify cyclist stressors.
Dr. Kari Watkins is the Frederick Law Olmsted Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. Her research and teaching looks at how technology and public space can be used to encourage collective transportation (such as transit and rideshare) and active transportation (such as biking and walking). Dr. Watkins also serves as the Director of T-SCORE, a new United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) University Transportation Center on the subject of Strategic Implications of Changing Public Transportation Travel Trends.
The online public defence of Lara Zomer will take place at 15:00 h
