Martin Dijst
LISER, Urban Development and Mobility, Faculty Member
- Université du Luxembourg, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty Memberadd
Abstract This presentation points out that the discussions on accessibility are focused on the impact of land-use and transportation systems on the functioning of society in general or more specific on the opportunities to participate in... more
Abstract This presentation points out that the discussions on accessibility are focused on the impact of land-use and transportation systems on the functioning of society in general or more specific on the opportunities to participate in activities at different locations. However, being mobile to participate in activities is so much more than instrumental. Based on time geography, the presentation will develop a relational interpretation of accessibility. This interpretation is based on Actor Network Theory, (Post-) Phenomenology, Emotional Geography and Assemblage Theory. It introduces relational concepts in time geography, such as ‘embodied exposure, ‘relational string’ and ‘window of vulnerabilities’. Speaker’s Bio By discipline, Martin Dijst is urban geographer and in 2009 appointed as full professor of Urban Development and Spatial Mobility at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. December 1, 2017, he has been appointed as director of the department Urban Development and Mobility at LISER, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxemburg. His research on activity and travel behaviour, accessibility, impact of Information and Communication technologies, exposures to (un)healthy environments, social interactions with people and urban metabolism, is most often positioned in a time geographical framework supplemented with post-structuralist perspectives. In 2013, he initiated and managed till 2017 the Utrecht University interdisciplinary research program Healthy Urban Living. In this program, researchers from a large variety of medical, behavioural and GIS scientific disciplines started to work together to study issues related to healthy urban living. As part of the program, he initiated and developed with Rick Grobbee (UMCU) the Global and Geo Health Data Center.
Research Interests: Sociology and Geographer
The concept of Tradable Driving Rights (TDR), as a travel demand management tool, has received increasing attention over the last years. Because of the rising negative effects of road traffic on the one hand and the firm opposition to... more
The concept of Tradable Driving Rights (TDR), as a travel demand management tool, has received increasing attention over the last years. Because of the rising negative effects of road traffic on the one hand and the firm opposition to powerful measures such as road pricing and rationing on the other hand, a growing number of policymakers and researchers see TDR as a favorable alternative. Most of the studies published on TDR have explored viable TDR scheme designs from a theoretic perspective or have modeled traffic patterns under different TDR assumptions from a mathematical perspective. What is missing at the moment are studies that investigate the individual behaviors under TDR schemes. To provide some starting points, in this paper the authors discuss to what extent the TDR concept differs from more traditional pricing and rationing measures and how TDR as a measure will activate different behavioral mechanisms, largely inspired by findings from behavioral economy and psychology. The authors bring these mechanisms together in an integrative framework and describe some promising avenues for empirical studies on travel behavior under TDR.
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This book is a message to be humble before truth and reality and to relinquish the idea of controlling them. Planners do not have that much control. In retrospect, it was easy to conclude that in conditions of constant population growth... more
This book is a message to be humble before truth and reality and to relinquish the idea of controlling them. Planners do not have that much control. In retrospect, it was easy to conclude that in conditions of constant population growth and with an economy in fairly good shape, a linear model of urban development would be relatively easy to maintain: the origin of the idea of certainty and control. The population in the Western world is no longer growing though; on the contrary, many regions and cities are facing population decline. Added to that, the economy is proving quite uncertain as well. The two together impact on spatial development. This all means that we have to consider a fundamentally different perspective on the role of spatial planning and its position in urban and rural development. Instead of planning aiming to achieve controlled development, it might get more out of the various autonomous processes affecting urban and the rural areas. In addition to planners being e...
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BackgroundThe food environment has been hypothesized to influence cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension and coronary heart disease. This study determines the relation between fast-food outlet density (FFD) and the individual risk... more
BackgroundThe food environment has been hypothesized to influence cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension and coronary heart disease. This study determines the relation between fast-food outlet density (FFD) and the individual risk for cardiovascular disease, among a nationwide Dutch sample.MethodsAfter linkage of three national registers, a cohort of 2,472,004 adults (≥35 years), free from cardiovascular disease at January 1st 2009 and living at the same address for ≥15 years was constructed. Participants were followed for one year to determine incidence of cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart disease, stroke and heart failure. Street network-based buffers of 500 m, 1000 m and 3000 m around residential addresses were calculated, while FFD was determined using a retail outlet database. Logistic regression analyses were conducted. Models were stratified by degree of urbanization and adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, marital status, comorbidity, neighbourhood-level in...
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China’s High-Speed Railways (HSR) network is the biggest in the world, transporting large numbers of passengers by high-speed trains through urban networks. Little is known about the analytical meaning of the use of two types of flow... more
China’s High-Speed Railways (HSR) network is the biggest in the world, transporting large numbers of passengers by high-speed trains through urban networks. Little is known about the analytical meaning of the use of two types of flow data, namely, time schedule (transportation mode flow) and passenger flow data, to characterise the configuration of urban networks regarding the potential spatial effects of HSR networks on urban networks. In this article, we compare HSR passenger flow data with time schedule data from 2013 in China within the same analytical framework. The findings show great differences in the strength of cities and links generated using the two different types of flow data. These differences can be explained largely by the socio-economic attributes of the cities involved, such as tertiary employment, GDP per capita, the cities’ topological properties (closeness centrality) in HSR networks and institutional factors (hub status), especially for the difference in link ...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Social Sciences, Transport Engineering, Physical Activity, Built Environment, and 15 moreTIME, Older Adults, GPS, Level Design, Demographics, Health Research, Associations, Human Factors and Ergonomics, Activity Space, Time, Medicine and Health Sciences, Destinations, Residence, confounding, and Daily mobility
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The use of private cars has increased rapidly in developing countries, causing congestion and pollution in cities. In Iran, measures have been taken to manage the extensive automobile use in Tehran. Two downtown traffic zones were... more
The use of private cars has increased rapidly in developing countries, causing congestion and pollution in cities. In Iran, measures have been taken to manage the extensive automobile use in Tehran. Two downtown traffic zones were introduced: The Restricted Traffic Zone (RTZ) based on pass permission and the Odd-Even Zone (OEZ) based on license-plate number. This article investigates how and to what extent traffic zoning influences mobility behavior in Tehran. Two neighborhoods within these zones and one elsewhere were selected to compare the impact of traffic zoning on mode choice and travel time by means of regression analyses. The results show that zoning has decreased driving in both neighborhoods; although compared to the RTZ, the OEZ has had a limited impact. While car use has diminished in both neighborhoods compared to the area without restrictions, travel time has increased in the traffic zones. An explanation might be the low quality of the infrastructure for alternative m...
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In the past decade, many studies have explored the relationship between travelers’ travel mode and their trip satisfaction. Various characteristics of the chosen travel modes have been found to influence trip experiences; however, apart... more
In the past decade, many studies have explored the relationship between travelers’ travel mode and their trip satisfaction. Various characteristics of the chosen travel modes have been found to influence trip experiences; however, apart from the chosen modes, travelers’ variability in mode use and their ability to vary have not been investigated in the trip satisfaction literature. This current paper presents an analysis of commuting trip satisfaction in Beijing with a particular focus on the influence of commuters’ multimodal behavior on multiple workdays and their modal flexibility for each commuting trip. Consistent with previous studies, we find that commuting trips by active modes are the most satisfying, followed by trips by car and public transport. In Beijing, public transport dominates. Urban residents increasingly acquire automobiles, but a strict vehicle policy has been implemented to restrict the use of private cars on workdays. In this comparatively constrained context for transport mode choice, we find a significant portion of commuters showing multimodal behavior. We also find that multimodal commuters tend to feel less satisfied with trips by alternative modes compared with monomodal commuters, which is probably related to their undesirable deviation from habitual transport modes. Furthermore, the relationship between modal flexibility and trip satisfaction is not linear, but U-shaped. Commuters with high flexibility are generally most satisfied because there is a higher possibility for them to choose their mode of transport out of preference. Very inflexible commuters can also reach a relatively high satisfaction level, however, which is probably caused by their lower expectations beforehand and the fact that they did not have an alternative to regret in trip satisfaction assessments.
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Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are often proclaimed to facilitate the fragmentation of activities, a process whereby a certain activity is divided into several smaller pieces, which are performed at different times... more
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are often proclaimed to facilitate the fragmentation of activities, a process whereby a certain activity is divided into several smaller pieces, which are performed at different times and/or locations. This study analyzes two-day combined activity, travel and communication diaries collected among Dutch households and presents quantitative findings of the associations between ICTs and the spatiotemporal fragmentation of paid labour. Controlling for various coping strategies, employment and commute factors, household characteristics, lifestyle orientation, time personality and spatial context, statistically significant relations were found between ICTs and the spatiotemporal fragmentation of paid labour for both men and women. The fact that both positive and negative associations were found suggests that ICTs can be adopted to make use of opportunities to arrange paid labour in a flexible way, or as a compensation when such opportunities are lacking. The results also indicate that up to a certain degree these associations are gender specific.
Research Interests: Business, Sociology, Technology, Accessibility, Everyday Life, and 12 moreHome, ICTs, Information and Communication Technologies, Information and Communications Technology, Gender Differences, Netherlands, The Netherlands, Information Age, Mobile phone, Travel Time, Connections, and Space-Time Constraints
As a rapidly ageing population becomes an increasingly serious social challenge for Chinese megacities, issues affecting older adults’ subjective well-being (SWB) attract greater concern. However, it is difficult to gain a comprehensive... more
As a rapidly ageing population becomes an increasingly serious social challenge for Chinese megacities, issues affecting older adults’ subjective well-being (SWB) attract greater concern. However, it is difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of older adults’ SWB, since most SWB theories focus only on specific factors. Moreover, residential environmental factors are hardly considered in studies of older adults’ SWB. In this paper we therefore investigate the effects of residential environment and individual resources on the SWB of older adults in Shanghai, using the integrative theoretical framework proposed by Lindenberg. We investigate the relationships between resources (residential environment and individual resources), needs satisfaction and SWB using multiple regression analysis. Our results show that the residential environment exerts a stronger impact on SWB than individual resources. Good quality residential building, good accessibility to medical and financial facilities, higher economic status of a neighbourhood, and a lower proportion of older adults in a neighbourhood are important environmental correlates of SWB. Health appears to be the most significant individual resource; other important individual resources include household income, a high-skilled occupation, a job in the public sector and living with grandchildren. Comfort is the most important basic need for older adults.
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Understanding how infrastructures and urban environments shape the highly differentiated cycling experiences calls for further investigation. The current study addressed this challenge by employing Virtual reality (VR) applications.... more
Understanding how infrastructures and urban environments shape the highly differentiated cycling experiences calls for further investigation. The current study addressed this challenge by employing Virtual reality (VR) applications. Quantitative methods were combined with a video simulation approach to model demand for cycling under different scenarios. VR environment mirroring the streetscape of a Dutch city was created. Environment greenness (green vs. no green), Bicycle path width (wide vs. narrow), Traffic volume (low vs. high) were manipulated. Participants had to cycle within the environments created, and thus having VR bike experience translating real world bike ride. VR experiences and cycling behaviour in response to the manipulated factors were measured.The results showed that participants enjoyed cycling most within green environment (than no green), and with wide (than narrow) bicycle lane. It was safer to cycle within wide bicycle path, and within low (than high) traffic volume. The environment was perceived as more aesthetic when cycling within green environment.Regression modelling further explored the relationship between the parameters hypothesised to influence the VR experiences. The better the naturalness and presence were perceived, the higher was the engagement. The higher the engagement was, the more the VR experience was liked.Current outcomes are unambiguous in showing that VR technology opens new avenues in addressing real-life problems with huge societal relevance, like improving urban environment infrastructure to unlock cycling and thus active transport.
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Research Interests: Engineering, Psychology, Computer Science, Ecology, Virtual Reality, and 11 moreEnvironmental Sciences, Cycling, Ecological Validity, Spatial Presence, Stated Preference, Environmental Preferences, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Elsevier, Preference, Urban Landscape and Planning, and Immersive virtual environments
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The unprecedented pace and scale of economic, social and spatial transformations in urban China have by now been well documented. But while it is highly likely that these changes relate to far-reaching alterations in travel behaviour as... more
The unprecedented pace and scale of economic, social and spatial transformations in urban China have by now been well documented. But while it is highly likely that these changes relate to far-reaching alterations in travel behaviour as well, so far this topic has received much less attention. With this paper, we aim to help fill this gap through the following research questions: What are the main changes in travel behaviour in Nanjing, China; and how can we explain these changes? We answer these questions on the basis of a study of repeated cross-sectional data from the Nanjing Residents Travel Survey (NRTS) of 2008 and 2011. This leads to three main conclusions: first, changes in the urban form and transport systems of Chinese cities lead to larger daily travel distances and a considerable increase of transport by private cars and public transport at the expense of non-motorised transport modes; second, the impacts of the built environment and socio-demographics as determinants for travel behaviour change in different ways over time; and third, changes are not the same for all groups as there is a widening gap in travel behaviour of low-income groups and middle and high-income groups. We discuss the consequences for social exclusion and environmental sustainability.