Visual imagery is indispensable to many multi-attribute decision situations. Examples of such decision situations in travel behaviour research include residential location choices, vehicle choices, tourist destination choices, and various safety-related choices. However, current discrete choice models cannot handle image data algorithmically and thus cannot incorporate information embedded in images into their representations of choice behaviour. This gap between discrete choice models’ capabilities and the real-world behaviour it seeks to model leads to incomplete and, possibly, misleading outcomes. To solve this gap, this study proposes “Computer Vision-enriched Discrete Choice Models” (CV-DCMs). CV-DCMs can handle choice tasks involving numeric attributes and images by integrating computer vision and traditional discrete choice models. Moreover, because CV-DCMs are grounded in random utility maximisation principles, they maintain the solid behavioural foundation of traditional discrete choice models. We demonstrate the proposed CV-DCM by applying it to data obtained through a novel stated choice experiment involving residential location choices. In this experiment, respondents faced choice tasks with trade-offs between commute time, monthly housing cost and street-level conditions, presented using images. We find that CV-DCMs can offer novel insights into preferences regarding features presented in images, such as what street-level conditions people find most and least attractive and how these preferences vary across age groups.

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A thorough understanding of how urban space characteristics, such as urban equipment or network topology, affect people's density in urban spaces is essential to well-informed urban policy making. Hitherto, studies have primarily examined how the characteristics of the urban space impacts the number of people visiting different parts of the urban area (e.g., the city center). However, these studies almost without exception have used relatively small data sets, targeting specific neighborhoods or places. As a result, their findings are confined to specific areas and it is unclear to what extent their findings generalize to other urban areas. This study addresses this gap. We propose a new computer vision-based method to study how the urban space is associated with people's urban density in outdoor urban spaces. Specifically, our method uses a pre-trained object detection model to identify and count people as well as urban-related objects, such as presence of cars, and benches in millions street-level images collected throughout the Netherlands. Importantly, each street-level image is geo-located. Therefore, for each detected person and object its location is known. In turn, we regress urban space characteristics and urban-related objects on the number of people identified as a proxy for density in urban spaces. Our results show that higher numbers of people tend to be observed in places with smaller blocks, suggesting that compact urban development may be an effective way to increase people's density. Moreover, we find that the presence of food places and bicycles is associated with more people, indicating that urban planners could study the location of these amenities to attract more visitors to urban spaces and exploring the causality effects in this relationship. Our methodology offers a complementary way to monitor how the urban space is used over the time and to assess the effectiveness of urban interventions and policies.@en

By installing wireless sensors such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi at a specific set of intersections and/or roadways it is possible to detect the passage of vehicles equipped with these technologies. However, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth-equipped vehicles are not necessarily detected by every sensor they pass by, as the detection probability depends on several factors, such as weather, nearby infrastructure, or the vehicle’s speed. To address this lack of perfect information, we propose a methodology to infer the most likely route used by a vehicle between two successive detections. The methodology consists of three stages. The first stage entails constructing a graph of the road network and the location of the sensors. The second stage consists of using the wireless data to calibrate the distribution of dwell time at each node and travel time for each link of the graph defined in the first stage. The third and final stage consists of convoluting node and link time distributions between successive detections to obtain an aggregate time distribution for each potential route. A Bayesian inference is then applied based on the travel time observed for each vehicle and the number of missed detections, to determine the probability of each alternative route. The methodology is tested through microsimulations, showing a prediction performance of over 90% in most favorable scenarios tested. When compared to a benchmark approach to infer routes, the proposed methodology provides better results when the network’s sensory density is low and data available are reduced.@en