Antonio Páez

McMaster University | McMaster · Department of Geography and Earth Sciences

Research on children’s destinations has primarily focused on school trips, yet their lives are more than that. Different destinations contribute to children’s quality of life in different ways, but this is rarely examined. For our research, focus groups were conducted with different stakeholders to better understand non-school destinations, namely...

This article presents an open data product with large geo-referenced micro-data sets of 2018 real estate listings in Spain. These data were originally published on the idealista.com real estate website. The observations were obtained for the three largest cities in Spain: Madrid ( n = 94,815 observations), Barcelona ( n = 61,486 observations), and...

Place-based accessibility measures communicate the potential interaction with opportunities at a zone that populations can access. Recent research has explored the implications of how opportunities are counted by different accessibility methods. In conventional measures, opportunities are multiply counted if more than one zone offers access to the...

The increase in the spatial resolution of satellite imagery and the greater distribution of data have enabled the use of remote sensing for urban studies. However, there is still a lack of databases and cartographic publications for cities in the Brazilian Amazon. Thus, the following questions guided this work: what is the state-of-the-art in remot...

Due to a change in capital funding formula, many school boards across the Province of Ontario engaged in Accommodation Reviews to rationalize the supply of school capacity. This process led to numerous school closures and raised important policy questions regarding the economic value of a school in terms of its capitalization into property values a...

Identifying urban patterns in the cities in the Brazilian Amazon can help to understand the impact of human actions on the environment, to protect local cultures, and secure the cultural heritage of the region. The objective of this study is to produce a classification of intra-urban patterns in Amazonian cities. Concretely, we produce a set of Urb...

Immobility is known to impact health and well-being by reducing social contact, activity participation, and changing time use patterns. These unfortunate effects mostly affect specific demographic segments, including older adults, low income families, people who face disabilities, and those living in conflict zones. Emergency measures taken during...

Identifying market segments can improve the fit and performance of hedonic price models. In this paper, we present a novel approach to market segmentation based on the use of machine learning techniques. Concretely, we propose a two-stage process. In the first stage, classification trees with interactive basis functions are used to identify non-ort...

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) identified Intraurban Typologies in several Brazilian urban concentrations using microdata from the 2010 Census. However, using weighting areas as a spatial unit of analysis and the indicators adopted makes it challenging to replicate the methodology for other areas. This paper aims to adap...

Thousands of families are threatened with being evicted from their homes in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area. In this sense, the question is: how could a Geographical Database collaborate to map these evictions and threats of evictions? what spatial patterns can be found in evictions and threats of evictions in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area? To an...

The primary method for collecting information about the Earth's surface in recent decades, notably for developing nations, has been remote sensing. Despite this, Amazonian cities lack databases and cartographic publications. Considering Santarém as the study site, this paper proposes to create a classification model for mapping the land cover of an...

In Chap. 5 we covered some important practical aspects around the estimation of the multinomial logit model. Many of them transfer to other kinds of discrete choice models as well. Before exploring other models we will take the opportunity, armed as we are with the practical skills to estimate the multinomial logit model, to see how discrete choice...

Models propose a simplified representation of the reality, which is useful to develop a common ground for describing, analyzing, and understanding complex phenomena. Model building requires three things: Raw materials. Tools. Technical expertise (hopefully!). This is true whether the model is physical (for instance a sculpture), conceptual (a menta...

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.

Chapters 7 and 8 were concerned with substitution patterns, particularly those resulting from the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) property of the logit model.

In the preceding chapters, our focus has been on modeling choices in situations where decision-makers are faced with a set of binomial or multinomial alternatives (e.g., heating systems, commute mode, etc.). The data sets used in the examples represent choices made by individuals or households among different alternatives that had one thing in comm...

Discrete choice modeling covers a family of techniques useful to infer decision-making processes in many disciplines, including economics, geography, transportation engineering and planning. These techniques are well represented in a variety of journals, including specialized outlets such as the Journal of Choice Modeling, and is a preferred tool i...

The multinomial logit model is the workhorse of discrete choice analysis. As seen in the preceding chapters, it is a model that is intuitive, and moreover, its closed analytical form makes it simple and convenient to estimate.

In Chap. 7, the topic of non-proportional substitution was discussed, and a method for deriving logit models using the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) system was presented. In particular, the nested (or hierarchical) logit model was introduced as an alternative modelling approach to alleviate the issues that emerge when a multinomial logit model is...

Chapter 9 introduced the latent class logit model, a technique useful to model taste variations in a sample. In this chapter, a variation on the theme will be introduced, namely the mixed logit model. We will see how the mixed logit model is related to the latent class logit model: the key difference is how the latent segments are conceptualized.

The concept of utility has many flaws—key among them is that it is not directly observable. If utility could be measured directly by an external observer (or analyst), behavior would seem deterministic. However, unlike Laplace’s Demon, an external observer with only human capabilities has limited knowledge of the conditions under which choices are...

There are many kinds of models: analog (like sculptures, maquettes, scale models), conceptual (like mental maps), and mathematical/statistical models.

Accessibility indicators are widely used in transportation, urban and healthcare planning, among many other applications. These measures are weighted sums of reachable opportunities from a given origin, conditional on the cost of movement, and are estimates of the potential for spatial interaction. Over time, various proposals have been forwarded t...

This paper describes and visualises the data contained within the {TTS2016R} data package created in R, the statistical computing and graphics language. {TTS2016R} contains home-to-work commute information for the Greater Golden Horseshoe area in Canada retrieved from the 2016 Transportation Tomorrow Survey (TTS). Included are all Traffic Analysis...

Upgrading informal settlements and improving the living conditions of their dwellers is still a challenge. In addition, it is important to produce up to date information about them. This exploratory research aimed at expanding the knowledge on informal settlements through the identification, description and comparison of typologies present in Brazi...

Background: Children's access to non-school destinations is important for their well-being, but this has been overlooked in transport planning. Research on children's access to non-school destinations is growing, and there is a need for a comprehensive overview, examining both quantitative and qualitative studies, of the existing evidence on place...

Accessibility indicators are widely used in transportation, urban, and healthcare planning, among many other applications. These measures are weighted sums of reachable opportunities from a given origin conditional on the cost of movement, and are estimates of the potential for spatial interaction. Over time, various proposals have been forwarded t...

This paper investigates stakeholder’s perspectives about freight congestion in Canada’s major metropolitan regions. Interviews with 28 Canadian stakeholders from different sectors are analyzed using Strauss/Corbin extended approach of symbolic interactionism with the objective of producing an explanatory theory to identify barriers to freight in Ca...

Bicycling is an increasingly popular mode of travel in Canadian urban areas, like the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). While trip origins and destinations can be inferred from travel surveys, data on route choice is often not collected which makes it challenging to capture the attributes of routes travelled by people who cycle. With new al...

Floating Catchment Area (FCA) methods are a popular choice for modelling accessibility to healthcare services because of their ability to consider both supply and demand. However, FCA methods do not fully consider aspects of travel and choicemaking behaviour as the only behavioural component is the impedance function. FCA approaches also tend to as...

Experiential education partnered with guided reflection is thought to support students with higher-order thinking skills. In this study, 44 reflections from two university-level sustainability courses were compared. In both courses students were asked to write a reflection, but only one course used the Reflective Learning Framework (RLF). Tests of...

Public bicycle share programs (PBSPs) can play a role in advancing transportation equity if they make bicycling more accessible to disadvantaged populations. In Ontario, Hamilton Bike Share expanded their program in 2018 by adding twelve “equity” stations with the explicit objective of increasing access for under-serviced neighborhoods. In this cas...

Discrete choice modeling covers a family of techniques useful to infer decision-making processes in many disciplines, including economics, geography, transportation engineering and planning. These techniques are well represented in a variety of journals, including specialized outlets such as the Journal of Choice Modeling, and is a preferred tool i...

In this paper we analyze the changes in accessibility to emergency and community food services before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the City of Hamilton, Ontario. Many of these food services are the last line of support for households facing food insecurity; as such, their relevance cannot be ignored in the midst of the economic upheaval caus...

Concern over the high rate of contagion of COVID-19 has prompted world authorities to use the strategy of isolation and social confinement as the main non-pharmacological weapon against the disease that has rapidly killed millions of people worldwide. However, there is evidence that the denialist rhetoric of the Brazilian President has negatively i...

The emergence of the novel SARS‐CoV‐2 coronavirus and the global COVID‐19 pandemic in 2019 led to explosive growth in scientific research. Alas, much of the research in the literature lacks conditions to be reproducible, and recent publications on the association between population density and the basic reproductive number of SARS‐CoV‐2 are no exce...

Background Bicycling is known to have many health benefits. For this reason, transport planners and public health officials in Canada increasingly aim to encourage bicycling for transport. On- and off-street infrastructure is often implemented to facilitate bicycling and planners rely on a range of tools for informing the design of the network of f...

GPS-equipped bike-share fleets are a source of rich data that can be used to estimate cycling volumes to assist infrastructure investment decisions aimed at increasing ridership. Using global positioning system (GPS) trajectories collected between January 1st, 2018 and December 31st, 2018 by Hamilton Bike Share (HBS), the volume of bike share trips...

The study investigates the role of the built environment attributes and their contextual effects on travel behaviour. The study utilized a dataset of 4739 respondents elicited from an online survey distributed in Hamilton City, Canada. A Nested Logit (NL) model and a quadratic polynomial trend surface are employed to spatially investigate the deter...

As cities make concerted efforts to become more bicycle-friendly through policy changes and infrastructure, it is important that such efforts ultimately support people who currently bicycle and remove barriers that may prevent more people from bicycling. Travel surveys can reveal the nature and distribution of bicycling trips, but perceptions and b...

Older pedestrians (65 years and above) are among the most vulnerable road users. As the number and proportion of older adults grows in many countries, and awareness of the benefits of active travel becomes increasingly evident, it behooves researchers to further investigate the safety of older pedestrians. This study contributes to the literature b...

The Government of Ontario in Canada announced the pilot for a new vaccination program, with designated pharmacies across the province now able to offer COVID-19 vaccines. The accessibility of this program raises questions about travel times to vaccination sites and the distribution of these times among the population. In our examination of the City...

Introduction Subjective wellbeing is a topic that has attracted considerable attention in the transportation literature in recent years. As a result, there is a burgeoning literature that investigates the impacts of travel on subjective wellbeing, and how wellbeing, in turn, can influence behavior. An important aspect of subjective wellbeing are th...

The rapid spread of COVID-19 across the world has raised concerns about the responsiveness of cities and healthcare systems during pandemics. Recent studies try to model how the number of COVID-19 infections will likely grow and impact the demand for hospitalization services at national and regional levels. However, less attention has been paid to...

To relieve road congestion, a variety of transport demand management measures (TDM) have been implemented all over the world. The success of these measures has been found to depend at least partially on users’ perception about them. Several articles have jointly addressed the acceptability of public transport improvement (carrot policies) and road...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on mobility in every country and region around the world. Recent studies help to illuminate some of the dimensions of change - however, the evidence is still scant in developing countries. The objective of this paper is to present an exploratory analysis of the changes in the frequency of trip-making...

This paper aims to investigate the perceptions of neighborhood conditions and their effect on urban active transportation (UAT) in the context of a city in the Global South. We analyze data from a survey of commuters in the city of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. Concretely, we are interested in cycling and walking. A probabilistic model of mode use is estim...

Road crashes impose an important burden on health and the economy. Numerous efforts have been undertaken to understand the factors that affect road collisions in general, and the severity of crashes in particular. In this literature several strategies have been proposed to model interactions between parties in a crash, including the use of variable...

Sustainability challenges are complex and call for the effective development of knowledge, skills, and abilities in current and new leaders. New offerings in higher education provide sustainability training to complement studies in geography, engineering, science, and other disciplines, in many cases including innovative experiential learning compo...

Within the field of spatial analysis, filtering has emerged as a powerful modeling technique to retrieve systematic patterns of geographical variation. In this work, spatial filtering is introduced in the context of modeling mortality for the first time in actuarial literature. Specifically, the objective of this research is to identify patterns in...

Concern over the high rate of contagion of COVID-19 has prompted world authorities to use the strategy of isolation and social confinement as the main non-pharmacological weapon against the disease that has rapidly killed thousands of people worldwide. The aim of this study is to analyze the importance of the level of social isolation in reducing n...

The rapid spread of the new coronavirus across the world has raised concerns about the responsiveness of cities and healthcare systems during pandemics. Recent studies try to model how the number of COVID-19 infections will likely grow and impact the demand for hospitalization services at national and regional levels. However, less attention has be...

The novel SARS‐CoV2 has disrupted health systems and the economy, and public health interventions to slow its spread have been costly. How and when to ease restrictions to movement hinges in part on whether SARS‐CoV2 will display seasonality due to variations in temperature, humidity, and hours of sunshine. Here, we address this question by means o...

The novel SARS-CoV2 has disrupted health systems and the economy, and public health interventions to slow its spread have been costly. How and when to ease restrictions to movement hinges in part on whether SARS-CoV2 will display seasonality due to variations in temperature, humidity, and hours of sunshine. Here, we address this question by means o...

In 2020 Google released a set of Community Mobility Reports (GCMR). These reports are based on the company’s location-tracking capabilities and measure changes in mobility with respect to a baseline. This novel source of data offers an opportunity to investigate potential correlations between mobility and incidence of COVID-19. Using data from the...

In the spatial analysis of crime, the residential population has been a conventional measure of the population at risk. Recent studies suggest that the ambient population is a useful alternative measure of the population at risk that can better capture the activity patterns of a population. However, current studies are limited by the availability o...

The objective of this chapter is to understand the impacts of climate change on the land use pattern in Brazil. To do so, an economic model for optimal land use allocation was used, this model was derived from the profit maximization problem of a representative agent that has six options of land use: soybean, corn, sugar cane, other crops, pasturel...

Accessibility is a central concept in transport geography research that has been described as a holistic measure of transportation and land use systems. This concept has numerous implementations, but virtually all share the way accessibility is measured as an attribute of pairs of origins and destinations. Borrowing from concepts in network science...

Floating Catchment Area (FCA) methods are a popular tool to investigate accessibility to public facilities, in particular health care services. FCA approaches are attractive because, unlike other accessibility measures, they take into account the potential for congestion of facilities. This is done by 1) considering the population within the catchm...

The transportation impacts of an increasingly urban population have led planners and policy makers to consider ways to encourage the use of active travel in urban areas. Active travel is attractive from a planning perspective because its environmental impact is considerably lower than the alternatives, and in addition is known to have a number of p...

Many institutions of higher education increasingly place a focus on various forms of experiential education. While much work has been done in this and related areas, the resources currently available are not sufficient to effectively guide, assess, and evaluate student learning. Personal reflections can be used as a tool to assess student learning...

Decision Trees (DTs) are a machine learning technique widely used for regression and classification purposes. Conventionally, the decision boundaries of Decision Trees are orthogonal to the features under consideration. A well-known limitation of this is that the algorithm may fail to find optimal partitions, or in some cases any partitions at all,...

Residual spatial autocorrelation is a situation frequently encountered in regression analysis of spatial data. The statistical problems arising due to this phenomenon are well‐understood. Original developments in the field of statistical analysis of spatial data were meant to detect spatial pattern, in order to assess whether corrective measures we...

Accessibility planning is a crucial alternative to mobility planning for reaching sustainable outcomes. Although there is a vast literature on accessibility, less attention is paid to accessibility as a relative concept, i.e., its relationship with the socio-economic characteristic of the population. While accessibility is known to vary by location...

Accessibility planning is a crucial alternative to mobility planning for reaching sustainable outcomes. Although there is a vast literature on accessibility, less attention is paid to accessibility as a relative concept, i.e., its relationship with the socio-economic characteristic of the population. While accessibility is known to vary by location...

Recent studies empirically support the role of the built environment in inducing or hindering violent crime. Particularly, studies of the broken window theory have provided evidence that physical disorder is an environmental correlate of crime. This includes broken windows, vacant/abandoned housings, abandoned cars on street, graffiti, and decayed...

Infrastructure networks, including transportation, telecommunications, and energy grids, are essential for the correct functioning of many economic and social processes. Considering the import of networked critical infrastructure, it is clear that understanding the characteristics of networks that make them vulnerable to disruption is a valuable en...

Open spaces in cities, such as green spaces and parks, are key elements of urban landscapes and urban sustainability. Open spaces improve the quality of the environment, quality of life, and promote social interaction and inclusion. There is evidence of positive impacts on health. This research analyses the potential accessibility to open spaces in...

Key Messages Scan statistic is a useful tool to identify and delimit geographically spatial clustering of economic activity. Spatial clusters of high‐tech and knowledge‐intensive firms in the Greater Toronto Area in Canada are identified. A logit model of cluster membership is used to confirm that proximity to major transportation infrastructure, a...

The temporal persistence of crime hot spots is recognized as a valuable indicator of consistent problem areas. The current literature has not adequately addressed the mechanisms that perpetuate or interrupt persistent crime hot spots. Investigating the persistence of violent crime hot spots in Columbus, Ohio, from 1994 to 2002, this study fills a g...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the attributes of walkable environments from the perspective of seniors in the Island of Montreal in Quebec, Canada. The research is based on a combination of statistical analysis of travel diary data and field work to conduct walkability audits. The approach follows a sequence of logical steps. The fir...

López et al. (Reg Sci Urban Econ 40(2–3):106–115, 2010) introduce a nonparametric test of spatial dependence, called SG(m). The test is claimed to be consistent and asymptotically Chi-square distributed. Elsinger (Reg Sci Urban Econ 43(5):838–840, 2013) raises doubts about the two properties. Using a particular counterexample, he shows that the asy...

With the graying of populations across the world, the travel behavior of seniors has become a topic of growing interest in planning and research. Most attention in the field of transportation has been devoted to motorized travel. However, the use of various modes of transportation, including nonmotorized travel, remains to be fully investigated. In...

Given the aging demographic landscape, the concept of walkable neighborhoods has emerged as a topic of interest, especially during the last decade. However, we know very little about whether walkable neighborhoods promote walking among older adults, particularly those with lower incomes. Therefore in this paper we: (i) examine the relation between...

Gender differentials in commuting have been reported in the literature, often couched within the household responsibility hypothesis. This hypothesis attributes shorter commutes to females due to a disproportionate load of household responsibilities. The objective of the present study is to report research regarding commuting time in São Paulo Metr...