VEHICLE DENSITY ESTIMATION IN QUEZON CITY USING OBJECT-BASED FEATURE EXTRACTION ON SATELLITE IMAGES

Manual vehicle counting is often tedious, expensive, and time-consuming. While automatic counting from CCTV allows for annual average daily traffic estimation, CCTV files in the Philippines are not available to the public and do not fully cover all road extents. In this study, Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques are employed to use readily available satellite images to obtain vehicle count in selected road segments in the Central Business Districts of Quezon City before and after the COVID-19 lockdown. Using the existing Google Earth Images, a segmentation algorithm using ENVI Feature Classification was developed to allow remote counting of vehicles from the earliest image in 2018. The devised algorithm was able to delineate, identify, and classify according to the types of vehicles that are visible on the image. An average error rate of 12.24% was found by comparison of automated counts and manual counts on the images, while a regression analysis yielded a value of R2 = 0.9227 that denoted a strong relationship between automated and manual counts. Vehicle density was calculated, and percent differences were obtained to determine the relative differences of the vehicle counts from the vehicle count of the earliest image taken in 2018. It was found that the vehicle density declined by at least 81% by March 25, 2020. The methodological framework presented in this study provides estimates of vehicle counts and vehicle density. It can be further improved if vehicle counts, on the same location and period, from field validation surveys are available.

Revitalising the Heart: Addressing the vacant CBD of Rotorua

<p>The issue of abandoned retail stores is one that is evident throughout the country and at different scales throughout the world. The appearance leaves main streets and central business districts’ looking tired and run down and does little to benefit the local economy. The rise and demand of international retail corporations in provincial cities, has transformed inner city infrastructure. This combined with suburban sprawl has resulted in high building vacancies and poor community moral. Looking to new theories around Urban Interior Architecture, this research explores the boundary between internal and external design methods and pushes for a merger of the design disciplines to create a coherent spatial context. In order to repopulate the city, human focused design methods are explored to encourage social interactions, commercial activity and habitation of the many vacant sites. Through the use of site-specific design, Rotorua will be investigated to understand the reasoning for the abandoned stores and will look to the urban context to identify potential remedies to solve the neglect. The identity of Rotorua its Placemaking and Cultural Heritage of its people will inform the design response to bring the community back into the heart of the central city.</p>

Revitalising the Heart: Addressing the vacant CBD of Rotorua

<p>The issue of abandoned retail stores is one that is evident throughout the country and at different scales throughout the world. The appearance leaves main streets and central business districts’ looking tired and run down and does little to benefit the local economy. The rise and demand of international retail corporations in provincial cities, has transformed inner city infrastructure. This combined with suburban sprawl has resulted in high building vacancies and poor community moral. Looking to new theories around Urban Interior Architecture, this research explores the boundary between internal and external design methods and pushes for a merger of the design disciplines to create a coherent spatial context. In order to repopulate the city, human focused design methods are explored to encourage social interactions, commercial activity and habitation of the many vacant sites. Through the use of site-specific design, Rotorua will be investigated to understand the reasoning for the abandoned stores and will look to the urban context to identify potential remedies to solve the neglect. The identity of Rotorua its Placemaking and Cultural Heritage of its people will inform the design response to bring the community back into the heart of the central city.</p>

Working from Home

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered an experiment in enforced home-working across the globe. In the UK, the home-based workforce jumped from 14 per cent to almost 50 percent of the overall working population, a trend mirrored in countries across the world. Largely welcomed by both employees and employers, many organizations predict a hybrid future that combines working at home and in a centralized collective workplace. This has major consequences for the way we inhabit, conceptualize and design the city and the suburbs, as more (and different) space is needed in the home and employers realize that they can reduce their property footprints. The 24-hour inhabitation of residential areas brings new life to local streets and economies, while Central Business Districts and High Streets lie silent. This paper approaches this as a paradigm shift: for more than a century mono-functional homes and workplaces have been systematically separated – ways now have to be found to reintegrate them. Covid has shone a spotlight on major social and spatial inequalities, with the poor and the young disproportionately impacted. Priorities for researchers and policy-makers include the future use of redundant commercial buildings, and analyses of policy and law, including planning, space standards, tenancy agreements, Bedroom Tax and social housing allocations, that obstruct home-based work – and proposals for alternatives.

Operational Evaluation of a Throughabout to Give Priority to Public Transport at Standard Roundabouts

The presence of roundabouts in the central business districts (CBD) of cities can reduce the travel speed of bus rapid transit (BRT) along the radial routes. A throughabout is an unconventional and low-cost design in which the central island is split to provide exclusive lanes for major traffic streams. Although the operation of throughabout has been limitedly investigated for private transport, it has been less considered by designers for public transport and for increasing the speed of the BRT system. The current study aims to evaluate the effects of throughabouts on private and public transports and to compare the design with standard roundabouts and conventional intersections. The calibrated and validated results of the microsimulation tool (AIMSUN) indicated that the throughabout improved the travel time of both public and private transports through better use of the space and kept the traffic flowing at all volume levels. The travel speed of the BRT in the throughabout was remarkably stable in both signal-controlled and unsignalized intersections. The standard roundabout was the second-best design. The throughabout can be very helpful in corridors along which the demand for the bus transit is high and the system needs to receive priority.

Central Business District Proposal for Vasai Virar City

The concept of the Central Business District is somewhat new due to that there is a lack of Central Business Districts in India. In the early ages when the concept was introduced at that time this concept was mainly focused on the United States of America and the European countries which are developed now. To increase the development speed of the country Central Business Districts should be introduced to create more job opportunities which will help to decrease the unemployment rate of the country. In Vasai-Virar Municipal Area, there is a lack of commercial spaces, affecting the city's employment opportunities. The idea of the Central Business District will help to develop the city and increase the revenue of the municipality. Vasai-Virar Central Business District will soon be established as a strong alternative to Mumbai and an economically developed or developing city in terms of employment and will help create sustainable employment opportunities for the economically backward Vasai-Virar and the people living nearby. This project mainly focuses on the potential of Central Business District development in Vasai-Virar city to overcome the unemployment and revenue generation options for Municipality. Keywords: Central Business District, Unemployment, Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Vasai-Virar city, Commercial and Trade activity

Neighborhood Isolation During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans’ daily lives by changing how and when they move. These changes could alter inequalities in mobility and therefore contribute to many forms of social stratification. Relying on SafeGraph cellphone movement data in 2019-2020 we focus on the 25 largest cities in the U.S. and measure inequality in mobility between census tracts by using two indexes proposed by Phillips and colleagues (2019). These measures capture the importance of hubs in a mobility network (Concentrated Mobility Index) and neighborhood isolation (Equitable Mobility Index). We find that the pandemic affected mobility inequality in all 25 cities. In the earliest phases of the pandemic, neighborhood isolation rapidly increased, and the importance of downtown central business districts declined. Mobility hubs generally regained their importance, whereas neighborhood isolation remained elevated started and to increased again during the latter half of 2020. Furthermore, we estimate linear regression models with city and week fixed effects predicting changes in neighborhood isolation relative to 2019 baseline. We find that larger numbers of new COVID-19 cases are positively and statistically significantly associated with changes in neighborhood isolation a week later. Additionally, we find that places with larger populations, more public transportation use, and greater racial and ethnic segregation all had larger increases in neighborhood isolation during 2020. Our results indicate that few cities returned to “normal” mobility patterns and that cities may remain more unequal than before the pandemic.

Reframing Public Spaces: from Recreational Amenity to Civic Good in Resilient Cities. COVID-19 Offers an Opportunity to Re-evaluate Neighbourhood Spaces to Ensure they are Available to All

Cities emerging from the pandemic increasingly recognize that public spaces are a critical element of resilience, not merely recreational amenities. Future public spaces must be designed to accommodate more diverse and distanced activities, and may even change function entirely during public health emergencies. The need for informal public spaces has also become apparent, and cities can benefit from identifying them as resources and integrating them into land-use plans. Parks, sidewalks and cycling paths can be justified as investments in resilience and survivability and quickly expanded. Their provision must be viewed through the lens of social and spatial equity: in many cities, not every person or community has convenient access to these critical public goods. Planners must go beyond metrics on the mere availability or density of public spaces, and delve deeper to assess the quality of spaces, and the ability of different demographic groups to reach them. Historic neighbourhoods that developed organically offer useful inspiration when designing for equitable access and daily convenience, and can also accommodate the dispersal of jobs away from central business districts. Efforts to develop decentralised, “complete” neighbourhoods can be a boon for adaptive reuse, public space provision, and greater variety of work settings, while public areas of civic buildings can be re-imagined as nodes of collaboration in a knowledge-based economy. Beyond building infrastructure, maintaining lively and welcoming public spaces requires empathy, respect for the commons, and care for fellow human beings. Physical spaces in a city can only be fully and genuinely “public” if they are safe, and open to everyone, regardless of age, language, identity, sexual orientation or ability. As cities undertake revitalization efforts following the pandemic, they must strive to ensure such places are available to all.

Subcentres as Destinations: Job Decentralization, Polycentricity, and the Sustainability of Commuting Patterns in Canadian Metropolitan Areas, 1996–2016

Adopting more sustainable modes of transportation and shorter daily commutes remains a fundamental challenge in the struggle for the sustainable transition of cities. While past studies on the sustainability of commuting behaviours partly focused on the place of residence and how the characteristics of commuters or residential neighbourhoods impact sustainable travel, other studies looked at the place of employment to analyze these dynamics. In this study, we investigate the extent to which the recent phase of the rise of peripheral employment has promoted more sustainable travel behaviour, based on the hypothesis that polycentricity has recently favoured a better job–housing balance and co-location. We develop a general typology of employment centres, using Census microdata at fine spatial scale over the 1996–2016 period to observe commuting modes and distances by subcentre types for six major Canadian cities. Our results show that despite recent developments in planning practices—transit-oriented development, transport infrastructure, and changing travel behaviour, the emergence of peripheral subcentres promoted less sustainable commuting patterns in most Canadian metropolitan areas over the period. However, we find sustainable commuting emerging in subcentres where large public transport infrastructure investments have been made, such as in the case of Vancouver’s Millennium and Canada lines. Our study also shows that central business districts (CBDs) and downtown subcentres are becoming relatively more sustainable over the period, which confirms the positive effect of the back-to-the-city movement and changing behaviour toward active transportation in these locations.