Designing Zoning Systems for Freight Transportation Planning: A GIS-based approach for Automated Zone Design using Public Data Sources

摘要

The first step in transportation planning studies is the discretization of study area into numerous zones. Zoning systems are expected to reflect the characteristics of the area they divide and is of crucial importance to the planning process. In order to obtain zones appropriate for freight demand modelling, the zoning process needs to be incorporated with zonal characteristics that account for inter-zone variability of freight movements. These zones can be termed as Freight Traffic Analysis Zones (FTAZs). Although these zones will ease the task of freight data collection, compatibility should exist between zoning systems for passenger and freight movements. The existing zoning systems, such as census boundaries, lacks the generalizability to use in passenger and freight transportation planning framework, hence needs to be updated. Rather than using the existing zones or completely changing them on an administrative scale, the alternative option could be to update the zones by regrouping them using an automated zone design methodology. The objective of automated zone design is to maximize the homogeneity in FTAZs using a cluster analysis while effectively incorporating the essential contiguity criteria. This could be efficiently done on a Geographic Information System (GIS) platform. This research aims to demonstrate the design of FTAZs by performing clustering analysis of basic spatial units in a GIS platform. Jaipur Metropolitan region is taken as a case study in this paper to execute the methodology with the use of publicly available data sources. The analyses and findings presented in this paper should be helpful for identifying appropriate zone delineation strategies for developing freight demand models.