Modeling the Spatial Distribution of Modal Split of Passenger Cars and Powered Two-Wheelers in Tainan Metropolitan Areas Using Geographically Weighted Regression

Abstract

The number of powered two-wheelers (PTW) and passenger cars is still increasing in many developed and developing countries Due to the huge amount of PTWs and cars in modern cities they have become one of the most important issues in city planning and transportation This study is aimed toward gaining a more comprehensive understanding of why people choose motor vehicles as their daily travel mode and illustrates the use of the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) technique to estimate the strength of the relationships between accessibility urban form characteristics and social economic characteristics for each administrative neighborhood in Tainan Metropolitan Areas in Taiwan The study area includes 412 administrative neighborhoods and fifteen districts Ordinary least squares (OLS) and GWR were conducted to examine the effect of potential covariates and to compare their outputs The results show that PTWs dominate the road traffic in the Tainan metropolitan areas On the other hand results of the GWR models in both transportation modes were found to be better than in the OLS method In general the results indicated accessibility entropy of land use and average income have significant influences on vehicle usage Accessibility was found to have a negative relationship with the usage of cars while intersection distance and average income were found to be proportionate to the usage rate of cars Entropy parameters which reflect the degree of land use mix varied across the study areas The coefficients of all of the variables satisfied statistical significance tests in the usage of the PTW model the results for which also varied from place to place These results indicate that compared to cars the use of PTWs is much more local and more easily influenced by local geographic characteristics The findings may provide informative insights for planners and policy makers to shape vehicle use in urban areas and surrounding exurbs

Date of Award	2016 Aug 31
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tzu-Chang Lee (Supervisor)