Browsing by Subject "active travel"

Active travel modes are gaining popularity for their positive physical and mental health and envi- ronmental benefits. Active travelers are more exposed to environmental variables than other road users. These environmental exposures have various positive and negative effects on travelers’ well- being. The major global routing platforms, such as Google Maps or Apple Maps, do not include any transparent use of environmental variables for path finding or visualization, despite the scientific evidence. I aim to study route planning tools from an environmental exposure perspective to understand the current support for exposure-optimized routes better. A route planning tool review shows that current platforms lack support for environmental exposures. Scientific research on environmental exposures needs more variety, transferability, and reproducibility. These results indicate that more robust, transferable, and flexible multi-objective environmental exposure optimization tools are needed. Such a tool would benefit many different groups of people, from experts such as planners and scientists to ordinary citizens. In this thesis, I set out to develop a powerful and flexible multi-objective routing tool. This tool aims to quantify and optimize environmental exposures during active travel. To achieve this, I designed a tool that supports route planning with active travel modes, supporting individual routes and mass calculations without spatial restrictions. This tool supports various exposure data types of raster and vector, such as greenery, noise, and air quality. To power this tool, I utilized Conveyal’s r5 routing engine. To showcase the tool’s applicability and configurability, I ran the tool and altered combinations of routing strategies, cities, exposure data sources, and configurations. The results show that creating a flexible multi-objective environmental exposure routing platform is viable. Data qualities such as exposure data coverage, data buffers, and weights can significantly affect the exposure results and paths. This thesis proves that this type of flexible environmental exposure-supporting routing tool can have great potential to support environmentally sustainable development, active travel environmental exposure studies, and individual exposure-optimized route planning. Further research is required to better understand how different environmental exposures accumulate during travel and affect active travelers’ well-being