News from the Digital Geography Lab, University of Helsinki
The Helsinki Region Travel Time Matrix can now be observed via an interactive web map http://www.mapple.fi !
The interface allows you to inspect travel times in different modes of transport (public transport, car and walking) at different times of the day (rush-hour, noon) to and from locations of your own choise within the Helsinki Region.
The application was developed by Joona Repo, Rami Piiroinen and Henrikki Tenkanen, good job guys!
We are organizing a special course on accessibility and mobility issues, staring on November 1st. The course is entitled: “Analysing accessibility and mobility using novel data sources” and it will familiarize the students with current theory of accessibility and mobility research, as well as practical tools and data developed by our group. Looking forward to meeting the students and hearing their thoughts on these topics!
We participated in a NECTAR worshop (Network on European Communications and Transport Activities Research) in Warsaw between 20.-21.10.2016. The workshop was entitled “Transport Infrastructures for better Accessibility, Equity and Territorial Cohesion” and there were nearly 30 interesting and inspiring accessibility-related presentations from all over Europe. Henrikki presented our recent paper on grocery store accessibility (published in International Journal of Health Geographics) and Maria presented our ongoing work on dynamic accessibility modelling.
RC33 Conference 2016 – 9th International Conference on Social Science Methodology was held in 11.-16. September 2016 in Leicester, UK. One of the emerging issues was the impact of new research skills and the big data revolution on teaching and research in social sciences. Olle in collaboration with an Estonian sociologist Dr. Anu Masso from ETH Zurich presented their ongoing research on evaluating big data approach (mobile phone data-based methodology) against conventional questionnaire survey method for investigating individual human mobility in space-time. Case study is about language group differences in individual activity space in Estonia.
Thanks to WCTR 2016, Olle had a chance to meet with professor Makoto Tsukai from Hiroshima University. This led to a short-noticed meeting at our department on August 5th. With a special focus on implementing novel (big) data sources in transport research Accessibility Research Group presented past and current work to five Japanese professors from the University of Hiroshima, Tottori and Miyazaki. In turn, guests introduced their current work in this field.
We kindly thank our guests for the presents from Hiroshima and already looking forward to join our research!
Accessibility Research Group was present at 14th World Conference on Transport Research in Shanghai, China, 10. – 15.07.2016. Olle presented a poster of our ongoing work about dynamic accessibility modelling and mobile phone-based data. Thank you WCTR and Shanghai for the great opportunity to receive encouraging feedback from our work and new exciting contacts for a future collaboration!
Accessibility Research Group and the SomeCon-project started the new academic year with a two-day getaway in Lohjanjärvi, Southern Finland!
The program included intensive brainstorming, goal-setting, mushroom-picking and listening to the silence of the lake.
The upcoming year is anticipated to be interesting with new papers coming out, new people joining the team and interesting activities (conferences, teaching, workshops) coming up. 
In our new article “Health research needs more comprehensive accessibility measures: integrating time and transport modes from open data” we discuss and demonstrate why and how both temporality and multimodality should be integrated in health related studies that include accessibility perspective. We provide evidence regarding the importance of using multimodal spatio-temporal accessibility measures when conducting research in urban contexts. In our case, we study the healthy food accessibility in Helsinki metropolitan area.
Our results show that both time and mode of transport have a prominent impact on the outcome of the analyses; thus, understanding the realities of accessibility in a city may be very different according to the setting of the analysis used. Neglecting time and (multiple) transport modes from spatial analyses may lead to overly simplified or even erroneous images of the realities of accessibility. Hence, there is a risk that health related planning and decisions based on simplistic accessibility measures might cause unwanted outcomes in terms of inequality among different groups of people.
Article is open access and it was published in International Journal of Health Geographics. Read the full article here:
http://ij-healthgeographics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12942-016-0052-x
Accessibility Research Group and SoMeCon project is actively present in this years Mobile Tartu Conference. Tuuli gives a keynote on the use of social media data on mobility studies, Henrikki presents our works in Kruger National Park (SA) with social media data and Olle tells about dynamic accessibility modelling in urban environments. Vuokko is our guerilla poster representive! Greetings from Tartu!
Accessibility Research Group was actively present at the 19th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science in Helsinki, Finland. Henrikki Tenkanen gave a talk on our open data for accessibility and travel time analyses and Olle Järv presented a poster on dynamic accessibility modeling. See also the poster on social media data by the SomeCon-project!
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University of Helsinki
