An important question in planning and designing bike-sharing services is to support the user’s tr... more An important question in planning and designing bike-sharing services is to support the user’s travel demand by allocating bikes at the stations in an efficient and reliable manner which may require accurate short-time demand prediction. This study focuses on the short-term forecasting, 15 min ahead, of the shared bikes demand in Montreal using a deep learning approach. Having a set of bike trips, the study first identifies 6 communities in the bike-sharing network using the Louvain algorithm. Then, four groups of LSTM-based architectures are adopted to predict pickup demand in each community. A univariate ARIMA model is also used to compare results as a benchmark. The historical trip data from 2017 to 2021 are used in addition to the extra inputs of demand related engineered features, weather conditions, and temporal variables. The selected timespan allows predicting bike demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that the deep learning models significantly outperform the AR...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020
Land use and transportation scenarios can help evaluate the potential impacts of urban compact or... more Land use and transportation scenarios can help evaluate the potential impacts of urban compact or transit-oriented development (TOD). Future scenarios have been based on hypothetical developments or strategic planning but both have rarely been compared. We developed scenarios for an entire metropolitan area (Montreal, Canada) based on current strategic planning documents and contrasted their potential impacts on car use and active transportation with those of hypothetical scenarios. We collected and analyzed available urban planning documents and obtained key stakeholders’ appreciation of transportation projects on their likelihood of implementation. We allocated 2006–2031 population growth according to recent trends (Business As Usual, BAU) or alternative scenarios (current planning; all in TOD areas; all in central zone). A large-scale and representative Origin-Destination Household Travel Survey was used to measure travel behavior. To estimate distances travelled by mode, in 2031...
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2020
This study proposes a methodological framework to understand the behavior of bikeshare-metro-bike... more This study proposes a methodological framework to understand the behavior of bikeshare-metro-bikeshare (BMB) users and assess the complementarity of bikeshare and transit. This analysis was conducted using Montreal’s Bixi bikeshare data collected over an 8-year period. A k-medoid clustering analysis was performed using three variables describing users’ travel behavior: BMB rate, most frequent BMB trip share, and rate of use of different metro stations. It reveals six groups of BMB users: (1) regular commuters, (2) irregular commuters, (3) occasional commuters, (4) mixed users, (5) leisure users, and (6) utility users. Each group’s share of trips is stable over time. BMB users represent an increasing, yet still marginal, share of 1.8% of Bixi’s annual members. The bikeshare segments of BMB trips averaged 1,180 m, with a standard deviation of 830 m. This confirms bikeshare is useful to complete the first and last kilometer of transit trips. Moreover, BMB trips increased with the expan...
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2018
Historically, travel surveys have been conducted face-to-face, by mail, or by phone. With the inc... more Historically, travel surveys have been conducted face-to-face, by mail, or by phone. With the increasing share of households having access to the Internet, other survey modes have been deployed. This paper focuses on web surveys. Among other advantages, using the web to conduct surveys reduces costs and helps mitigate poor response rates among young households. Very few studies have been conducted on interview duration and its determinant using paradata from web travel surveys. Such knowledge is necessary to validate the context in which travel data are gathered and can be used to understand sample and data quality. Interview duration modeling is also essential for allocating survey servers and monitoring interviews during the data collection phase. This paper models interview duration using paradata from nine web surveys conducted in the Quebec province from 2010 to 2014. The main objectives of the model are to assist the monitoring of interviews by detecting outliers, provide a be...
Since public transit infrastructure affects road traffic volumes and influences transportation mo... more Since public transit infrastructure affects road traffic volumes and influences transportation mode choice, which in turn impacts health, it is important to estimate the alteration of the health burden linked with transit policies. We quantified the variation in health benefits and burden between a business as usual (BAU) and a public transit (PT) scenarios in 2031 (with 8 and 19 new subway and train stations) for the greater Montreal region. Using mode choice and traffic assignment models, we predicted the transportation mode choice and traffic assignment on the road network. Subsequently, we estimated the distance travelled in each municipality by mode, the minutes spent in active transportation, as well as traffic emissions. Thereafter we estimated the health burden attributed to air pollution and road traumas and the gains associated with active transportation for both the BAU and PT scenarios. We predicted a slight decrease of overall trips and kilometers travelled by car as we...
The study of the relationship between activity–travel behaviour and the development of city-regio... more The study of the relationship between activity–travel behaviour and the development of city-regions is a matter of great concern among researchers and urban planners. Much of the current debate focuses on understanding and influencing the relationship between transportation and land use systems, with a view to achieving economic, sustainability, and quality of life policy objectives. The essence of the transport-land
This study assessed relationships between built environmental exposures measured within component... more This study assessed relationships between built environmental exposures measured within components of individual activity spaces (i.e., travel origins, destinations and paths in-between), and use of active transportation in a metropolitan setting. Individuals (n=37,165) were categorised as using active or sedentary transportation based on travel survey data. Generalised Estimating Equations analysis was used to test relationships with active transportation. Strength and significance of relationships between exposures and active transportation varied for different components of the activity space. Associations were strongest when including travel paths in expression of the built environment. Land use mix and greenness were negatively related to active transportation.
With the graying of populations across the world, the travel behavior of seniors has become a top... more With the graying of populations across the world, the travel behavior of seniors has become a topic of growing interest in planning and research. Most attention in the field of transportation has been devoted to motorized travel. However, the use of various modes of transportation, including nonmotorized travel, remains to be fully investigated. In this paper the multimodal trip generation of seniors in Montreal Island is studied. Personal, mobility tools, neighborhood, and accessibility variables are considered in a trivariate ordered probit model of three modes: car, transit, and walking. Geographical analysis of the walking component of the model helps to identify locations within the region where walking is more or less prevalent among older adults.
Cities are facing many challenges, in particular in relation to the mobility of people and the st... more Cities are facing many challenges, in particular in relation to the mobility of people and the structure of land use. Parking management, which makes the link between land use and transportation, is one of the crucial ways to meet these challenges. In the Greater Montreal Area, data from origin–destination (OD) surveys is helpful in understanding typical travel behaviour. This study processes car driver trips from travel surveys to develop vehicle accumulation profiles and derive theoretical parking supplies from the observed parking demand, defined as the maximal number of cars parked in an area at a given time. This research also provides an assessment of the quality of the estimation by comparing the parking supplies derived from an OD survey to parking supplies estimated from public geographical information systems and field surveys. The paper shows that parking supply is subject to high variability and highlights that its assessment must take into account regulation data (obtai...
In 2056, more than one quart of the Quebec population will be aged 65 years and older. Population... more In 2056, more than one quart of the Quebec population will be aged 65 years and older. Population aging is a worldwide issue and urban areas facing such intense phenomena will face multiple challenges, namely related to the provision of efficient and adapted social services such as transportation. Using data from five large-scale Origin-Destination travel surveys from the Montreal Area, covering 20 years, a pseudo-cohort analysis is conducted to document how features and behaviors of elderly are changing over time. Eights cohorts of people are studied using an age-period-cohort-characteristics modeling framework. Individual car access, non-motorization and transit share are modeled using this approach allowing to separate the effects due to aging, cohort (year of birth) and period (fundamental changes affecting all cohorts). Results show that age has a negative impact on car access but that there is an important positive period effect; non-motorization evolution is mainly due to aging while period and cohort effects are negative; age and cohort effects reduce transit share but the period one is now increasing since 1998 (generalized increase in transit share). The application of such models for prediction is also illustrated.
Taxi is a collective transportation mode that is suffering from under examination. Still, it can ... more Taxi is a collective transportation mode that is suffering from under examination. Still, it can certainly contribute to the adoption of more sustainable travel behaviours as part of co-mobility strategies to reduce dependency towards the private car and all the negative impacts it has. This paper focuses on the role of taxis in the daily travel behaviours of Montrealers. Using a global positioning system (GPS) dataset over one month of operation (October 2011) of a fleet of 968 taxis (app. 22% of the entire fleet of the region), various descriptive analysis are conducted to understand how, when and where the taxis are used. Analysis is conducted at various levels: first, a single taxi is examined and then indicators are generalised to the entire set of data namely trip distance, mean duration, runs per day. The study also reveals important spatial and temporal trends: 95% of the runs are conducted during weekdays, between 6 am and 9 am and 32% of the origins of the runs are concentrated within an are a of 12.3 km² (2.5% of the Montreal Island). Hence, incidence of various factors such as weather or public holiday on usage is examined. For instance, the authors observe that during rainy days, the number of runs increases significantly and that their average length decreases. Specific studies of a main trip generator, the international airport, and of the central business district (CBD), are also conducted confirming the as symmetry of trip ends namely generated by the way the industry is managed i.e. with permits linked to specific zones. Based on spatial - temporal structure of taxi travel demand, we conclude that this transportation mode is often used for constraint trips (work) or to travel when other services are not in operation (at night for instance).
An important question in planning and designing bike-sharing services is to support the user’s tr... more An important question in planning and designing bike-sharing services is to support the user’s travel demand by allocating bikes at the stations in an efficient and reliable manner which may require accurate short-time demand prediction. This study focuses on the short-term forecasting, 15 min ahead, of the shared bikes demand in Montreal using a deep learning approach. Having a set of bike trips, the study first identifies 6 communities in the bike-sharing network using the Louvain algorithm. Then, four groups of LSTM-based architectures are adopted to predict pickup demand in each community. A univariate ARIMA model is also used to compare results as a benchmark. The historical trip data from 2017 to 2021 are used in addition to the extra inputs of demand related engineered features, weather conditions, and temporal variables. The selected timespan allows predicting bike demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that the deep learning models significantly outperform the AR...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020
Land use and transportation scenarios can help evaluate the potential impacts of urban compact or... more Land use and transportation scenarios can help evaluate the potential impacts of urban compact or transit-oriented development (TOD). Future scenarios have been based on hypothetical developments or strategic planning but both have rarely been compared. We developed scenarios for an entire metropolitan area (Montreal, Canada) based on current strategic planning documents and contrasted their potential impacts on car use and active transportation with those of hypothetical scenarios. We collected and analyzed available urban planning documents and obtained key stakeholders’ appreciation of transportation projects on their likelihood of implementation. We allocated 2006–2031 population growth according to recent trends (Business As Usual, BAU) or alternative scenarios (current planning; all in TOD areas; all in central zone). A large-scale and representative Origin-Destination Household Travel Survey was used to measure travel behavior. To estimate distances travelled by mode, in 2031...
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2020
This study proposes a methodological framework to understand the behavior of bikeshare-metro-bike... more This study proposes a methodological framework to understand the behavior of bikeshare-metro-bikeshare (BMB) users and assess the complementarity of bikeshare and transit. This analysis was conducted using Montreal’s Bixi bikeshare data collected over an 8-year period. A k-medoid clustering analysis was performed using three variables describing users’ travel behavior: BMB rate, most frequent BMB trip share, and rate of use of different metro stations. It reveals six groups of BMB users: (1) regular commuters, (2) irregular commuters, (3) occasional commuters, (4) mixed users, (5) leisure users, and (6) utility users. Each group’s share of trips is stable over time. BMB users represent an increasing, yet still marginal, share of 1.8% of Bixi’s annual members. The bikeshare segments of BMB trips averaged 1,180 m, with a standard deviation of 830 m. This confirms bikeshare is useful to complete the first and last kilometer of transit trips. Moreover, BMB trips increased with the expan...
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2018
Historically, travel surveys have been conducted face-to-face, by mail, or by phone. With the inc... more Historically, travel surveys have been conducted face-to-face, by mail, or by phone. With the increasing share of households having access to the Internet, other survey modes have been deployed. This paper focuses on web surveys. Among other advantages, using the web to conduct surveys reduces costs and helps mitigate poor response rates among young households. Very few studies have been conducted on interview duration and its determinant using paradata from web travel surveys. Such knowledge is necessary to validate the context in which travel data are gathered and can be used to understand sample and data quality. Interview duration modeling is also essential for allocating survey servers and monitoring interviews during the data collection phase. This paper models interview duration using paradata from nine web surveys conducted in the Quebec province from 2010 to 2014. The main objectives of the model are to assist the monitoring of interviews by detecting outliers, provide a be...
Since public transit infrastructure affects road traffic volumes and influences transportation mo... more Since public transit infrastructure affects road traffic volumes and influences transportation mode choice, which in turn impacts health, it is important to estimate the alteration of the health burden linked with transit policies. We quantified the variation in health benefits and burden between a business as usual (BAU) and a public transit (PT) scenarios in 2031 (with 8 and 19 new subway and train stations) for the greater Montreal region. Using mode choice and traffic assignment models, we predicted the transportation mode choice and traffic assignment on the road network. Subsequently, we estimated the distance travelled in each municipality by mode, the minutes spent in active transportation, as well as traffic emissions. Thereafter we estimated the health burden attributed to air pollution and road traumas and the gains associated with active transportation for both the BAU and PT scenarios. We predicted a slight decrease of overall trips and kilometers travelled by car as we...
The study of the relationship between activity–travel behaviour and the development of city-regio... more The study of the relationship between activity–travel behaviour and the development of city-regions is a matter of great concern among researchers and urban planners. Much of the current debate focuses on understanding and influencing the relationship between transportation and land use systems, with a view to achieving economic, sustainability, and quality of life policy objectives. The essence of the transport-land
This study assessed relationships between built environmental exposures measured within component... more This study assessed relationships between built environmental exposures measured within components of individual activity spaces (i.e., travel origins, destinations and paths in-between), and use of active transportation in a metropolitan setting. Individuals (n=37,165) were categorised as using active or sedentary transportation based on travel survey data. Generalised Estimating Equations analysis was used to test relationships with active transportation. Strength and significance of relationships between exposures and active transportation varied for different components of the activity space. Associations were strongest when including travel paths in expression of the built environment. Land use mix and greenness were negatively related to active transportation.
With the graying of populations across the world, the travel behavior of seniors has become a top... more With the graying of populations across the world, the travel behavior of seniors has become a topic of growing interest in planning and research. Most attention in the field of transportation has been devoted to motorized travel. However, the use of various modes of transportation, including nonmotorized travel, remains to be fully investigated. In this paper the multimodal trip generation of seniors in Montreal Island is studied. Personal, mobility tools, neighborhood, and accessibility variables are considered in a trivariate ordered probit model of three modes: car, transit, and walking. Geographical analysis of the walking component of the model helps to identify locations within the region where walking is more or less prevalent among older adults.
Cities are facing many challenges, in particular in relation to the mobility of people and the st... more Cities are facing many challenges, in particular in relation to the mobility of people and the structure of land use. Parking management, which makes the link between land use and transportation, is one of the crucial ways to meet these challenges. In the Greater Montreal Area, data from origin–destination (OD) surveys is helpful in understanding typical travel behaviour. This study processes car driver trips from travel surveys to develop vehicle accumulation profiles and derive theoretical parking supplies from the observed parking demand, defined as the maximal number of cars parked in an area at a given time. This research also provides an assessment of the quality of the estimation by comparing the parking supplies derived from an OD survey to parking supplies estimated from public geographical information systems and field surveys. The paper shows that parking supply is subject to high variability and highlights that its assessment must take into account regulation data (obtai...
In 2056, more than one quart of the Quebec population will be aged 65 years and older. Population... more In 2056, more than one quart of the Quebec population will be aged 65 years and older. Population aging is a worldwide issue and urban areas facing such intense phenomena will face multiple challenges, namely related to the provision of efficient and adapted social services such as transportation. Using data from five large-scale Origin-Destination travel surveys from the Montreal Area, covering 20 years, a pseudo-cohort analysis is conducted to document how features and behaviors of elderly are changing over time. Eights cohorts of people are studied using an age-period-cohort-characteristics modeling framework. Individual car access, non-motorization and transit share are modeled using this approach allowing to separate the effects due to aging, cohort (year of birth) and period (fundamental changes affecting all cohorts). Results show that age has a negative impact on car access but that there is an important positive period effect; non-motorization evolution is mainly due to aging while period and cohort effects are negative; age and cohort effects reduce transit share but the period one is now increasing since 1998 (generalized increase in transit share). The application of such models for prediction is also illustrated.
Taxi is a collective transportation mode that is suffering from under examination. Still, it can ... more Taxi is a collective transportation mode that is suffering from under examination. Still, it can certainly contribute to the adoption of more sustainable travel behaviours as part of co-mobility strategies to reduce dependency towards the private car and all the negative impacts it has. This paper focuses on the role of taxis in the daily travel behaviours of Montrealers. Using a global positioning system (GPS) dataset over one month of operation (October 2011) of a fleet of 968 taxis (app. 22% of the entire fleet of the region), various descriptive analysis are conducted to understand how, when and where the taxis are used. Analysis is conducted at various levels: first, a single taxi is examined and then indicators are generalised to the entire set of data namely trip distance, mean duration, runs per day. The study also reveals important spatial and temporal trends: 95% of the runs are conducted during weekdays, between 6 am and 9 am and 32% of the origins of the runs are concentrated within an are a of 12.3 km² (2.5% of the Montreal Island). Hence, incidence of various factors such as weather or public holiday on usage is examined. For instance, the authors observe that during rainy days, the number of runs increases significantly and that their average length decreases. Specific studies of a main trip generator, the international airport, and of the central business district (CBD), are also conducted confirming the as symmetry of trip ends namely generated by the way the industry is managed i.e. with permits linked to specific zones. Based on spatial - temporal structure of taxi travel demand, we conclude that this transportation mode is often used for constraint trips (work) or to travel when other services are not in operation (at night for instance).
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Papers by Catherine Morency