Characterisation of Travel Behaviour and Accessibility in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Abstract

Car-dependent travel has posed economic, environmental, and social concerns worldwide. Existing transportation policy promotes a shift toward sustainable transportation through enhancing transit and active transportation infrastructure and creating mixed-use, more connected communities. Exploratory analyses that characterise travel behaviour and accessibility offer significant insight for transportation and land use policy. Interestingly, Halifax residents desire to be sustainable, as reflected by their positive attitudes toward transit and active transport, but their travel behaviour is auto-dependent. Halifax residents travel primarily via automobile for all trip purposes but mainly walk for school trips. Residents of the Regional Centre, which is most accessible to all service destinations, travel more sustainably than residents of Suburban areas and the Rural Commutershed. There are considerable spatial differences in accessibility across the Halifax region. Although the Regional Centre is most accessible, accessibility to all destinations by all modes is considerably lower on the Dartmouth side of the Regional Centre when compared to the Halifax Peninsula. Halifax is most accessible to health services, restaurants, and general shopping destinations. Accessibility by active travel modes is low for Suburban areas and poor for the Rural Commutershed. The methods and findings of this study also contribute to the limited research on multi-modal, multi-destination accessibility measures. This study employs a unique, Composite Network-distance-based Accessibility Measure (CNAM), informed by transportation experts, which can be scaled to generate accessibility indicators for any aggregate spatial unit of interest. The CNAM signifies the density of service destinations that are proximate to a parcel of land. A higher CNAM reveals greater proximity to a higher number of destinations. The parcel-level estimation yields finer-grained results, but accessibility at the dissemination area (DA) level was also estimated, revealing that the majority of DAs in Halifax have a relatively low accessibility to service destinations, particularly by active travel modes. The findings of this study reveal that diversification and densification of land use activities should be concentrated in the Regional Centre and bordering Suburban areas, particularly in Dartmouth where accessibility scores are lower.