Browsing by Subject "Helsinki region"
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(2017)During the past few decades, online shopping has grown steadily and increased its share of all retail sales. As internet connections have become more common and the selection of available online services has diversified, an increasing number of consumers have started to purchase different products online. Buying online has many time-related benefits compared to traditional retail as it enables the consumer to make purchases whenever and wherever. Yet, online grocery retailing has been relatively small-scale in both Finland and abroad compared with other product categories. In the past few years, however, the competition has become more intense as the few dominant Finnish grocery retailers and several smaller businesses have developed their online business models. In this study, I focused on one of Finland's leading grocery retailers, Kesko, and the customers and spatial characteristics of its online grocery services. The aim of this study was to find out 1) whether the accessibility of services affects the choice between an online store and a physical retail outlet in the case of grocery retail, 2) whether the widely accepted socio-economic characteristics of typical online shoppers find evidence in the case of choosing online grocery retail over a physical store or the frequency of online purchases and 3) how Kesko's online grocery retail has spread in the Helsinki region during the couple of years it has been in operation and where its potential new market areas in the region are. The MetropAccess time-cost-matrix for the Helsinki Region was used for the accessibility calculations. Travel times were calculated from all inhabited cells in the area and only from Kesko's online store's customer cells to the closest Kesko grocery store and separately to the closest store when all grocery stores were taken into account in the Helsinki Region. In some previous studies, urban living environment and dense service network have been observed to increase the probability of being an online shopper whereas poor accessibility to services increases the intensity of online shopping. In other studies and national statistics data, a variety of socio-economic attributes have stood out as prominent characteristics of e-shoppers. These include: young age (age groups 25-34 and 35-39), higher education, student status and high income. In addition, I have included the percentage of underage children of a cell's inhabitants in the analyses as Kesko's own data points very clearly in the direction that families with children are an important customer group to online groceries. The socio-economic variables of the region's inhabitants were mostly drawn from HSY's SeutuCD 2015 and Tilastokeskus' Paavo zip code data. I made correlation analyses on the YKR-grid level where the other variables were 1) the percentage of online customer households proportioned to cell's population in the whole region and 2) the intensity of online shopping in customer cells proportioned to population, and the other variables were the socio-economic variables of the population and the travel-time accessibility of grocery stores. The statistically significant Spearman's correlation coefficients were not very high, but weak connections between variables could be found. Customership of the online grocery store correlates negatively with travel time accessibility and the intensity of online shopping correlates positively with accessibility, which is in line with previous findings in the literature. Of the socio-economic variables chosen for this study, the ones that correlate the most with online shopping are income (with shopping intensity) and the percentage of 25-34- year olds (with customership). Finally, I analysed some potential future areas for growth for Kesko's online grocery business in the Helsinki Region based on the previously mentioned socioeconomic variables and accessibility of grocery stores in the study area. One weakness of the study was the availability of detailed enough socio-economic data when compared to Kesko's own YKR grid-level customer data. Some of the socioeconomic variables where derived from larger spatial units such as zip codes, which weakens the reliability of the correlation analyses. However, the grid-level examination is quite coarse for the capital region as well, and especially in this case, when the customer dataset itself was quite small. The accessibility of grocery stores is relatively good in the whole study area, so the study might not bring out the impacts of accessibility of physical services to online shopping as explicitly as might really be the case if the study was carried out in an area or with product categories where physical accessibility varies more. Moreover, the study may not have sufficiently considered the special characteristics of online grocery retailing when compared with other product types. Due to the marginal status of online grocery retailing, it has not yet been studied extensively in research literature. The results, however, do partly support previous findings of the connections between specific socioeconomic variables and the accessibility of services, and the customership of online stores and the intensity of online shopping activities.
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(2017)The formation of urban structure is a complicated process and its outcome, that cannot be easily forecast, is not necessarily optimal. This creates a need to understand the process and gives a reason to control it by urban planning. As the circumstances are in constant change, the plans have to anticipate the time to come – partly far into the future. Research is needed to support planning to understand the factors that affect the urban structure better. Accessibility, that seems to be one of the key factors in the processes of land use change, seems to provide a suitable tool for planning and research: when suitably defined, it can connect the properties of transport and land use systems as well as the economic, social and environmental goals. The availability of services is closely connected to the quality of living environment, so studying the accessibility of them can produce new notable information for the needs of urban planning. The aim of this study was to explain how changes in urban structure cause changes in the accessibility of services by walking, mass transit and car in the long term, and study how these changes could affect the use of the services both from the perspectives of the users' possibilities and the potential the services produce. The public library network in Helsinki region was studied as an example. Studying the accessibility of public libraries is useful as such, as they provide many types of positive impacts, but public libraries are also a convenient example in studying the accessibility of services as they are a service actively used in everyday life and information about the use is available. Distances in the accessibility measures were measured as travel time. Accessibility was measured both in travel times to the nearest library and in potentials of making a library trip calculated by library trip forecasting models based on the real behaviour of their users. Comparison was made between the years 2014 and 2050, during which the population and the transport system are expected to change as in the created scenarios, which are based on the new Helsinki City Plan. In addition, the possible effects to the accessibility of the public libraries by possible cost cuts in the service network were inspected by simulating the effects of the cuts. Based on the results the public libraries in the study area seem to be relatively well accessible by all the inspected transport modes. The changes in the transport systems seem to have minor effects on the accessibility when measured in travel time to the nearest library, but when the effects are measured in the potentials of making a library trip, they seem to be a bit more significant – by mass transit, accessibility would improve and by car, it would deteriorate. The forecast change in the population would increase the number of people accessing the nearest library in half an hour, but the proportion of this group to the total population in the area would be smaller than before. The attraction of libraries affect to the potentials they produce, but the impacts are concentrated on the surrounding areas of the libraries and on the traffic routes, where the accessibility is relatively good to begin with. Even though excluding some of the smallest libraries from the service network would have relatively small effects on the accessibility in the aggregate, the effects on individual level and for sustainable accessibility could be significant. Based on the study results more significant than the changes in the transport system or in the attraction of the services seem to be how near population and services are located each other: the prerequisites for multimodal accessibility cannot necessarily be guaranteed if the distances are long. Based on the study results, to prevent the deterioration of the preconditions of the goals of Finnish regional planning and the qualifications for sustainable accessibility due to the forecast population change – in other words to keep the current standard of service – some changes in the service network would be needed. However, as there was only one type of service inspected in this study and as there is uncertainty if the scenarios will happen in the future, the conclusions that can be drawn from the results are restricted. Still, studying the accessibility of a single service is useful as such as the needs for different type of services are different, and if it will give some hints of the future accessibility of services in general at the same time, even though just in a few scenarios, it can be easier to be prepared for the future.
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(2017)Transportation in cities is facing the challenges of congestion and environmental impact caused by the increase in traffic flows. These issues can be reduced by promoting more sustainable transport modes, such as cycling. To increase its modal share, cycling has to be an attractive and competitive choice compared to other travel modes. Digital Geography Lab in University of Helsinki has developed comparable measures for modelling accessibility with different travel modes in Helsinki region. However, cycling is missing from the data because it has been previously modelled with simplistic assumptions of constant travel speed. Little research has been carried out to assess the applicability of this assumption. The main objective of this thesis is to develop a more realistic GIS model for calculating optimal routes and travel times of cycling in Helsinki region taking into account the feasibility of the model. Other objectives are to find out what factors affect cyclists' travel speed and can the environmental factors be used as impedances in the travel time model, what kind of spatial differences the cycling speeds have, and how realistic it is to model cyclists' travel times with constant speed on a regional scale. According to previous research, among the various things affecting cycling some of the main environmental factors are slope, junctions and traffic lights. The effects of these factors to cycling speeds in Helsinki region were analysed based on individual cycling routes and on a route and segment level from the whole data with linear regression models. GPS data of cycling was collected from volunteers who had been tracking their cycling in Helsinki region with mobile sports applications. Basic background information of the cyclists was also collected to analyse the variations in speed between different background variables. Road network for cycling and walking by Helsinki Region Transport was used as the modelling network. A GIS-based map-matching method for the cycling GPS data was developed by applying a method developed for map-matching GPS data of cars. Slope was calculated for route segments using NLS 2 meter digital elevation model and the traffic light information was derived from Digiroad. Python scripts used in modelling are available on GitHub. The cycling speeds vary by cycling frequency: cyclists who stated to cycle almost every day of the week, 3-5 times a week, or a few times a week have median speeds of 24 km/h, 22 km/h and 18 km/h, respectively. Uphill slope and signalized junctions decelerate and downhill slopes accelerate cycling speeds on individual routes. Looking at the whole data, speed has a weak negative correlation between slope and different junction types. On a regional scale the effect of signalized junctions is the greatest, whereas uphill slope has the greatest effect on route-based mean speeds. The regression models do not explain the variation in cycling speeds very well (R2 ≈ 0.1) so a travel time model based on constant speeds corresponding to the different median speeds of frequent and less frequent cyclists was implemented on the network. Spatial examination shows that mean cycling speeds in parts of central Helsinki are 0.8 times slower than in rest of the area, so the cycling speeds of the model were slowed down on those segments. Slope, traffic lights and other junctions affect cycling speeds on an individual level but not on the regional scale. Based on model validation the travel times of the constant speed model correlate strongly with the real travel times of the GPS data. The model taking into account the slower parts of central Helsinki is marginally better but the difference is only slight and affecting only the routes going via the city centre. The difference in travel times caused by different constant speeds is much greater. Constant speed can hence be seen as an adequate assumption to model cyclists' travel times in Helsinki region but the personal and spatial differences in cycling speeds should be taken into account.
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