How long does it take to park a private car in Helsinki Capital Region? – A map based survey

The parking survey is available in English and in Finnish.

Read in Finnish

How long does it take to park a private car in Helsinki Capital Region? Is there variation in parking times in different districts of the Capital Region? How can we explain the hypothetical variation?

We are now researching how long does it take for a private car to find a parking spot, park and walk to one’s final destination in different areas of Helsinki Capital Region using a map based survey. In the survey linked below the user chooses postal code areas where they remember having parked in the last two years. For each postal code area user is asked to fill a short form how their parking experience usually is in that area. The survey is created in such a way that data can be sent from as many postal code areas as the user wants – all in one session.

Please find the map based web application survey here. We ask you to answer to the survey latest at 30th June 2019. The survey starts up by default in English. If you wish to fill out the survey in Finnish, you can change the language by clicking the EN/FI button located in the upper left corner of the screen.

About the research

This survey research is a part of the Master’s thesis of Sampo Vesanen. The work is connected to the Helsinki Region Travel Time Matrix, a tool created by Digital Geography Lab which represents travel time distances between statistical grid cells in Helsinki Region by public transport, walking and bicycling. The values in the travel time matrix are calculated using the door-to-door approach. For private cars this means that searching for parking, the parking proper and walking to one’s destination is a part of the travel time. Up until now the time it takes to carry out this process has been a singular estimation deployed to the entire Helsinki Capital Region. This does not represent reality well enough.

The data collected from this survey are used to answer the following questions: what is the variation in parking times between postal code areas in Helsinki Capital Region, what could cause the variation and what is the significance of the parking time in the context of the total travel time of a private car in Helsinki Capital Region. The finalised results of the Master’s thesis will be used to supplement the private car parking process data in the Helsinki Region Travel Time Matrix.

Filling the survey

In the survey the user is asked to estimate how their parking experience usually is in each postal code area. Please answer to each question using your best judgement and answer to each postal code area only once. We seek responses not older than two years because the urban structure of Helsinki Capital Region experiences constant change and possibilities for private car parking change with it. If you require additional information about the questions in the survey, please refer to the information dialog window in the survey. This window will appear on the screen of your device at survey start-up.

You can use a desktop computer, a laptop or a mobile device to fill out the survey. It requires 1-10 minutes of your time. On desktop or laptop it is important you use the latest browser software, recommendations being Chrome or Firefox. On mobile devices it is recommended to use a device that runs Android with Chrome being the browser software. If you wish to fill out the survey using your mobile device (especially if using an Apple device), please read the mobile usage instructions in the information dialog window.

Usage of gathered data

The data gathered in this survey do not reveal any personal information about respondents because of the general scope of the questions used. The web application running the survey will save your IP address for tracking user activity. In the analysis phase of the thesis all collected IP addresses will be altered into random and anonymous string of characters and all the IP addresses will be deleted. The survey web application uses cookies to save user preferences. If you do not delete the cookies manually, they will expire 90 days from their creation.

Further information

In any inquiries regarding the survey or the research, please contact Sampo by email: sampo.vesanen(at)helsinki.fi.

NECTAR conference in Helsinki in 2019 as part of the “Science workshops”-project!

The Digital Geography Lab research group will host the international NECTAR (Network on European Communications and Transport Activities Research) conference in June 2019 in Helsinki!  The previous NECTAR-conference was held in Madrid this June and Tuuli was there to welcome all to Finland in two years’ time. Though there is still time before the conference, we are starting gradually to organize the event this autumn.

The conference will be a part of the “Science workshops on novel and open data sources and approaches to study urban accessibility and mobility” project funded by Finnish Cultural Foundation. The project started this year and our group’s new member, Elias Willberg, will take care of the it’s practical realization together with the other group.

As part of this project we will also organize several smaller accessibility and mobility related workshops both national and international during the next year. These workshops aim to bring together researchers working with these topics in different places and thus enhance networks and collaboration between these people.

See the NECTAR Conference 2019 website here: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/towards-human-scale-cities-open-and-happy

Accessibility sessions in the annual meeting of Finnish Geographers

The annual meeting of Finnish geographers (Geography Days) was held in Helsinki during 26.–27.10.2012. We organized two accessibility sessions that gathered a variety of interesting presentations from different universities and departments. The first session on Friday focused on accessibility from the perspective of networks and the theme of the second session on Saturday was accessibility in landscapes. The abstracts of all presentations (in Finnish) can be downloaded from the Geography Days’ website (Accessibility in networks: abstracts / Accessibility in landscapes: abstracts).

OKFestival

Open data sources and freely available software are important for our studies both in the Helsinki region and in Amazonia. Examples from both study areas were presented at the Open Knowledge Festival (17-22.9.2012) that focused on questions of open knowledge and open data.

The title of Tuuli´s presentation was “Accessibility analysis in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area – using open data sources to model spatial accessibility patterns”
and Henrikki´s topic was “Riverboats of the Amazon: Automated Data Mining and GIS-analyses of GPS-based river navigation data with OS-Softwares”.

Projects’ work on display in University of Helsinki’s magazines

Our work has recently been on display in several University of Helsinki’s publications. Our accessibility research of riverine Amazonia were dealt both in Yliopisto and in Helsinki University Bulletin. Our work on accessibility issues in Helsinki Metropolitan Area was presented with an example of Kumpula Campus in Yliopistolainen.

Check out the stories:

Data collection in Loreto, Peru

During August and September we started to gather long-term data on river navigation routes and speeds in the Peruvian Amazonia. A few river boat companies are collaborating with us and together with them we established a pilot system of tracking devices that send real-time location information from river boats to our server.

This information is  made available for the local actors trough an sms service. The long-term monitoring data will be used to analyze the spatio-temporal changes in river navigation and accessibility patterns. More information regarding this project will soon be available on this site.

Masusa harbour in September