How radial is general travel in Melbourne? (part 2)

Wed 11 September, 2019

In part 1 of this series, I looked at the radialness of general travel around Melbourne based on the VISTA household travel survey. This part 2 digs deeper into radialness by time of the day and week, and maps radialness and mode share for general travel around Melbourne.

A brief recap on measuring radialness: I’ve been measuring the difference in angle between the bearing of a trip, and a straight line to the CBD from the trip endpoint that is furthest from the CBD (origin or destination). An angle of 0° means the trip is perfectly radial (directly towards or away from the CBD) while 90° means the trip is entirely orbital relative to the CBD. An average angle in the low 40s means that there isn’t really any bias towards radial travel. I’ve been calling this two-way off-radial angle. Refer to part 1 if you need more of a refresher.

How does trip radialness vary by time of week?

The first chart shows the average two-way off-radial angle for trips within Greater Melbourne by time and type of day, for private transport, public transport, and walking.

Technical notes: I’ve had to aggregate weekend data into two hour blocks to avoid issues with small sample sizes. I’m only showing data where there are at least 100 trips for a mode and time (that’s still not a huge sample size so there is some “noise”). Trips times are assigned by the clock hour of the middle of the trip duration. For example, a trip starting at 7:50 am and finishing at 9:30 am has a mid-trip time of 8:40 am and therefore is counted in 8 – 9 am for one hour intervals, and 8 – 10 am for two hour intervals.

You can see:

  • Public transport trips are much more radial at all times of the week, but most particularly in the early AM peak and in the PM commuter peak. They are least radial in the period 3-4 pm on weekdays (PM school peak), which no doubt reflects school student travel, which is generally less radial.
  • Private transport trips are more radial before 8 am on weekdays, and in the early morning and late evening on weekends. Curiously private transport trips in the PM peak don’t show up as particularly radial, possibly because there is more of a mix of commuter and other trips at that time.
  • Walking trips show very little radial bias, except perhaps in the commuter peak times on weekdays.

When I drill down into specific modes, the sample sizes get smaller, so I have used 2 hour intervals on weekdays, and 3 hour intervals on weekends. Also to note is that VISTA assigns a “link mode” to each trip, being the most important mode used in the journey (generally train is highest, followed by tram, bus, vehicle driver, vehicle passenger, bicycle, walking only). I am using this “link mode” in the following charts.

Some observations:

  • Train trips are the most radial, followed by tram trips (no surprise as these networks are highly radial).
  • Bicycle trips are generally the third most radial mode, except at school times.
  • Public bus trips are more radial in the commuter peak periods, and much less radial in the middle of the day on weekdays. The greater radialness in commuter peaks will likely reflect people using buses in non-rail corridors to travel to the city centre (particularly along the Eastern Freeway corridor). Most of Melbourne’s bus routes run across suburbs, rather than towards the city centre, which will likely explain bus-only trips being less radial than train and tram, particularly off-peak.

How does radialness vary by trip purpose and time of week?

The following chart shows the average two-way off-radial angle of trips by trip purpose (at destination) and time of day:

Some observations:

  • Work related trips are generally the most radial, particularly in the AM peak (as you might expect), but less so on weekdays afternoons.
  • Weekday education trips are the next most radial (excluding trips to go home in the afternoon and evening), except at school times (school travel being less radially biased than tertiary education travel).
  • Social trips become much more radial late at night on weekends, probably reflecting inner city destinations.
  • Recreational trips are the least radial on weekends.
  • Otherwise most other trip purposes average around 35-40° – which is only slightly weighted towards radial travel.

What is the distribution of off-radial angles by time of day?

So far my analysis has been looking at radialness, without regard to whether trips are towards or away from the CBD. I’ve also used average off-radial angles which hides the underlying distribution of trip radialness.

I’m curious as to whether modes are dominated by inbound or outbound trips at any times of the week (particularly private transport), and the distribution of trips across various off-radial angles.

So to add the inbound/outbound component of radialness, I am going to use a slightly different measure, which I call the “one-way off-radial angle”. For this I am using a scale of 0° to 180°, with 0° being directly towards the CBD, and 180° being directly away from the CBD, and 90° being a perfectly orbital trip with regard to the CBD. For inbound trips, the one-way off-radial angle will be the same as the two-way off-radial angle, but outbound trips will instead fall in the 90° to 180° range.

One-way off-radial angles are still calculated relative to the trip end point (origin or destination) that is furthest from the CBD. I explained this in part 1.

Here is the distribution of one-way off-radial angles by time of day for trips where train was the main mode:

A reminder: only time intervals with a sample of at least 100 trips are shown.

In the morning, trips are very much inbound radial, with around three-quarters being angles of 0°-10°. Likewise in the PM peak, almost three-quarters of train trips are very outbound radial with angles 170°-180°.

As per the second chart in this post, train trips remain very radial throughout the day. But there is slightly more diversity in off-radial angles 3-4 pm on weekdays, when many school students use trains for journeys home from school that are less radially biased. Less radial trips could be a result of using two train lines, using bus in combination with train, or using a short section of the train network that isn’t as radial (eg Eltham to Greensborough, Williamstown to Newport, or a section of the Alamein line).

On weekends it’s interesting to see that there are many more inbound than outbound journeys between 12 pm and 2 pm on weekends. The “flip time” when outbound journeys outnumber inbound journeys is probably around 2 pm. This is consistent with CBD pedestrian counters that show peak activity in the early afternoon.

One problem with the chart above is that volumes of train travel vary considerably across the day. So here’s the same data, but as (estimated) average daily trips:

You can see the intense peak periods on weekdays, and a gradual switch from inbound trips to outbound trips around 1 pm on weekdays. There’s also a mini-peak in the “contra-peak” directions (outbound trips in the AM peak and inbound trips in the PM peak).

The weekend volumes are for two hour intervals so not directly comparable to weekdays (which are calculated for one hour intervals), but you can see higher volumes of inbound trips until around 2 pm, and then outbound trip volumes are higher.

Those results for trains were probably not surprising, but what about private vehicle driver trips?

There is much more diversity in off-radial angles at all times of the day, and a less severe change between inbound and outbound trips across the day.

On both weekday and weekend mornings there is a definite bias towards inbound travel. Afternoons and evenings are biased towards outbound travel, but not nearly as much (it’s much stronger late at night). This is consistent with the higher average two-way off-radial angle seen for private transport in the PM peak compared to the AM peak.

Here is the same data again but in volumes:

This shows the weekday AM peak spread concentrated between 8 and 9 am, while the PM peak is more spread over three hours (beginning with the end of school).

Here are the same two charts for tram trips (the survey sample is smaller, so we can only see results for weekdays):

Again there is a strong bias to inbound trips in the morning and outbound in the afternoon, with slightly more diversity in the PM school peak, and early evening.

Next up public bus (a separate category to school buses, however many school students do travel on public buses):

There is a lot more diversity in off-radial angles (particularly 2-4 pm covering the end of school), but also the same trend of more inbound trips in the morning and outbound trips in the afternoon.

Next up, bicycle:

There’s a fair amount of diversity, across the day, with inbound trips dominating the AM peak and outbound trips in the PM commuter peak (but not as strongly in the PM school peak). Weekend late afternoon trips show a little more diversity than morning and early afternoon trips, but the volumes are relatively small.

Next is walking trips:

There is considerable diversity in off-radial angles across most of the week, although outbound trips have a larger share in the late evening.

Walking volumes on weekdays peak at school times. On weekends walking seems to peak between 10 am and 12 pm and again 4 pm to 6 pm, but not considerably compared to the rest of the day time.

Mapping mode shares and radialness

So far I’ve been looking at radialness for modes by time of day. This section next section looks at radialness and mode shares by origins and destinations within Melbourne.

In recent posts I’ve had fun mapping journeys to work from census data (see: Mapping Melbourne’s journeys to work), so I’ve been keep to explore what’s possible for general travel.

VISTA is only a survey of travel (rather than a census), so if you want to map mode shares of trips around the city, you unfortunately need to lose a lot of geographic resolution to get reasonable sample sizes.

The following map shows private transport mode shares for journeys between SA3s (which are roughly the size of municipalities), where there were at least 80 surveyed trips (yes, that is a small sample size so confidence intervals are wider, but I’m also showing mode shares in 10% ranges). Dots indicate trips within an SA3, and lines indicate trips between SA3s. I’ve animated the map to make try to make it slightly easier to call out the high and low private mode shares.

You can see lower private transport mode shares for radial travel involving the central city (Melbourne City SA3), particularly from inner and middle suburbs (less so from outer suburbs). Radial travel that doesn’t go to the city centre generally has high private transport mode shares.

I also have origin and destination SA1s for surveyed trips. Here is a map showing all SA1-SA1 survey trip combinations by main mode, animated to show intervals of two-way off-radial angles:

It’s certainly not a perfect representation because of the all the overlapping lines (I have used a high degree of transparency). You can generally see more blue lines (public transport) in the highly radial angles, and almost entirely red (private transport) and short green lines (active transport) for larger angle ranges. This is consistent with charts in my last post (see: How radial is general travel in Melbourne? (Part 1)).

You can also see that few trips fall into the 80-90° interval, which is because I’m measuring radialness relative to the trip endpoint furthest from the CBD. An angle of 80-90° requires the origin and destination to be about the same distance from the CBD and for the trip to be relatively short.

So there you go, almost certainly more than you ever wanted or needed to know about the radialness of travel in Melbourne. I suspect many of the patterns would also be found in other cities, although some aspects – such the as the geography of Port Phillip Bay – will be unique to Melbourne.

Again, I want to the thank the Department of Transport for sharing the full VISTA data set with me to enable this analysis.

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Posted by chrisloader

How radial are journeys to work in Australian cities?

Fri 14 June, 2019

In almost every city, hordes of people commute towards the city centre in the morning and back away from the city in the evening. This largely radial travel causes plenty of congestion on road and public transport networks.

But only a fraction of commuters in each city actually work in the CBD. So just how radial are journeys to work? How does it vary between cities? And how does it vary by mode of transport?

This post takes a detailed look at journey to work data from the ABS 2016 Census for Melbourne, Sydney, and to a less extent Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra. I’ve included some visualisations for Melbourne and Sydney that I hope you will find interesting.

How to measure radialness?

I’m measuring radialness by the difference in degrees between the bearing of the journey to work, and a direct line from the home to the CBD of the city. I’m calling this the “off-radial angle”.

So an off-radial angle of 0° means the journey to work headed directly towards the CBD. However that doesn’t mean the workplace was the CBD, it might be have been short of the CBD or even on the opposite side of the CBD.

Similarly, an off-radial angle of 180° means the journey to work headed directly away from the CBD. And a value of 90° means that the trip was “orbital” relative to the CBD (a Melbourne example would be a journey from Box Hill that headed either north or south). And then there are all the angles in between.

To deal with data on literally millions of journeys to work, I’ve grouped journeys by home and work SA2 (SA2s are roughly the size of a suburb), and my bearing calculations are based on the residential centroid of the home SA2 and the employment centroid of the work SA2.

So it is certainly not precise analysis, but I’ve also grouped off-radial angles into 10 degree intervals, and I’m mostly looking for general trends and patterns.

So how radial are trips in Melbourne and Sydney?

Here’s a chart showing the proportion of 2016 journeys to work at different off-radial angle intervals:

Technical note: As per all my posts, I’ve designated a main mode for journeys to work: any journey involving public transport is classed as “Public”, any journey not involving motorised transport is classed as “Active”, and any other journey is classed as “Private”.

In both cities over 30% of journeys to work were what you might call “very radial” – within 10 degrees of perfectly radial. It was slightly higher in Melbourne.

You can also see that public transport trips are even more radial, particularly in Melbourne. In fact, around two-thirds of public transport journeys to work in 2016 had a destination within 2 km of the CBD.

Melbourne’s “mass transit” system (mostly trains and trams) is very radial, so you might be wondering why public transport accounts for less than half of those very radial journeys (41% in fact).

Here are Melbourne’s “very radial” journeys broken down by workplace distance from the Melbourne CBD:

very-radial-trips-by-mode-distance-from-cbd

Public transport dominates very radial journeys to workplaces within 2 km of the centre of the CBD, but is a minority mode for workplaces at all other distances. Many of these highly radial journeys might not line up with a transit line towards the city, and/or there could well be free parking at those suburban workplaces that make driving all too easy. I will explore this more shortly.

Sydney however had higher public transport mode shares for less radial journeys to work. I think this can be explained by Sydney’s large and dense suburban employment clusters that achieve relatively high public transport mode shares (see: Suburban employment clusters and the journey to work in Australian cities), the less radial nature of Sydney’s train network, and generally higher levels of public transport service provision, particularly in inner and middle suburbs.

Visualising radialness on maps

To visualise journeys to work it is necessary to simplify things a little so maps don’t get completely cluttered. On the following maps I show journey to work volumes between SA2s where there are at least 50 journeys for which the mode is known. The lines between home and work SA2s get thicker at the work end, and the thickness is proportional to the volume (although it’s hard to get a scale that works for all scenarios).

First up is an animated map that shows journeys to work coloured by private transport mode share, with each frame showing a different interval of off-radial angle (plus one very cluttered view with all trips):

(click/tap to enlarge maps)

I’ve had to use a lot of transparency so you have a chance at making out overlapping lines, but unfortunately that makes individual lines a little harder to see, particularly for the larger off-radial angles.

You can see a large number of near-radial journeys, and then a smattering of journeys at other off-radial angles, with some large volumes across the middle suburbs at particular angles.

The frame showing very radial trips was rather cluttered, so here is an map showing only those trips, animated to strip out workplaces in the CBD and surrounds so you can see the other journeys:

Private transport mode shares of very radial trips are only very low for trips to the central city. When the central city jobs are stripped out, you see mostly high private transport mode shares. Some relative exceptions to this include journeys to places like Box Hill, Hawthorn, and Footscray. More on that in a future post.

Here are the same maps for Sydney:

Across both of these maps you can find Sydney’s suburban employment clusters which have relatively low private transport mode shares. I explore this, and many other interesting ways to visualise journeys to work on maps in another post.

What about other Australian cities?

To compare several cities on one chart, I need some summary statistics. I’ve settled on two measures that are relatively easy to calculate – namely the average off-radial angle, and the percent of journeys that are very radial (up to 10°).

The ACT (Canberra) actually has the most radial journeys to work of these six cities, despite it being something of a polycentric city. Adelaide has the next most radial journeys to work, but there’s not a lot of difference in the largest four cities, despite Sydney being much more a polycentric city than the others. Note the two metrics do not correlate strongly – summary statistics are always problematic!

Here are those radialness measures again, but broken down by main mode:

Sydney now looks the least radial of the cities on most measures and modes, particularly by public transport.

The Australian Capital Territory (Canberra) has highly radial private and active journeys to work, but much less-radial public transport journeys than most other cities. This probably reflects Canberra’s relatively low cost parking (easy to drive to the inner city), but also that the public transport bus network is orientated around the suburban town centres that contain decent quantities of jobs.

Adelaide has the most radial journeys to work when it comes to active and public transport.

What about other types of travel?

In a future post, I’ll look at the radialness of general travel around Melbourne using household travel survey data (VISTA), and answer some questions I’ve been pondering for a while. Is general travel around cities significantly less radial than journeys to work? Is weekend travel less radial than weekday travel?

Follow the blog on twitter or become an email subscriber (see top-right of this page) to get alerted when that comes out.

4 Comments | Australian Cities, Melbourne, Mode share, Sydney | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by chrisloader