Spatial data project 2 (R+ArcGis)
Spatial Analysis to improve the accessibility of Libraries’ users in Camperdown/Darlington campus
INTRODUCTION
As one of the students of the University of Sydney, I believe that I can be a representative to address the problem that most of the students faced throughout the semester. It is about finding an available place in libraries to review the class lecture or have some discussion about the group project with the team in an appropriate well-equipped meeting room. There is a study conducted by the Association of College and Research Libraries (2017) confirmed that the usage of the library’s learning space can relate to the student’s learning experience and academic success positively. So giving access of the library to the student not only could benefit the student’s performance but also the university itself in facilitating the high-quality learning experience.
OBJECTIVE
The ultimate objective of this analysis is to find a suitable route for the shuttle campus bus (my recommendation) that can help students to access to libraries available on the campus and ease the overload of the student in some popular libraries. Since the library is like a hub for all students, I would like to optimize the benefit of this internal transportation to serve most students in getting to their classroom as well if possible.
METHOD
Firstly, I identified the library users as someone who travels to and from the libraries in the Camperdown/Darlington campus. Then, the study will begin with finding the library users’ patterns to see where the users of libraries are and at what time of the day they tend to use the most by looking at the changes of the desired line across the week and time period. At the same time, the result will show the building usage of the libraries and where the users traveling from and to see how many potential users the bus can serve per building.
When I know the peak time from the first task, I will validate the data again across the week in task 2 if there is any difference in pattern of the route and building usage because there might be an anomaly that I can count as outliers. After removing the outliers from the 2 patterns and normalizing the building usage, now is the analysis for the possible solution. I will use proximity, amount users reach, and distance as the criteria to propose 2 most possible bus routes with some discussion on the impact of each option. And in the last task, I will analyze further which one could be a suitable route that helps the university to improve the library service and internal transportation with a recommendation.
ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT SITUATION INCLUDING THE R MAP
In the first step, I checked the current situation of the 2 patterns of movement, libraries’users route, and building usage. From time variation observation on Tuesday, as in Figure 1, each line represents the route that users take and the size of the line tells the number of people who use that route, I found that the routes are quite the same among 5 periods of the day with a variety of distance traveled from the middle and south parts of the campus, while the number of users varied significantly.
Right now the observation tells us that the shuttle bus could be most efficiently use in the afternoon, 13.00–17.00, as it has the largest number of both routes (most solid black) and users per each route (biggest line). However, it is still difficult to tell the number of usage of the libraries which one is in the most demand of the students and which building the library’s users are normally at?.
In Figure 2, the map gives detail of building usage focusing on the peak period of Tuesday demonstrating that the popular libraries, ones in a light blue, are mostly in the eastern part of the campus ranging from the up north to the middle part of the map. And the building of the users is in the northern and southern parts of the campus. So, in this step, I will leave the library on far west since there is a low number of routes and usage and it can add much time and cost to the university bus services.
ASSESSMENT OF CHANGE IN MOVEMENTS ACROSS THE WEEK (identification, analysis, and evaluation of your possible options)
Taken the analysis from task 1, I have validated the pattern again across the week in 13:00–17:00 period to find the anomaly. From Figures 3 and 4, there are a very low number of routes, users, and library usage on Saturday and Sunday, so I discarded weekend in a process to average the building usage for further use. From Figure 4, I also have validated and updated the active libraries from the University Library website and google map search which turned out that we only have 7 left and some have renamed.
Now I have the updated map, potential users number from the average, and the locations of buildings and libraries that a lot of users are at and go to. So, according to the study objective to improve the accessibility to the libraries, I will focus on the 3 criteria; the bus stops proximity, user reach by route proximity, and the total distance of the route.
- The bus stop
I created a buffer of 100 meters from each library and place the stop within the range as in Figure 5. One important note, you can see that one library, Herbert Smith Freehill Law Library, has no road access so users might need to use the nearest stop that is Fisher Library’s stop to get to it.
- The bus route
I designed the route on the principle that it has to pass all the libraries, serve as many users as possible, and take the shortest distance, So, I came up with 2 options.
Both offer the routes that pass to all libraries’ stops (except the far west one that I discarded earlier) and was designed to save a lot of distance and time as it is not running in a loop, instead, it just goes from one end of the line to another and then take a u-turn. The only difference is that one option, the short route option in Figure 6, starts and ends at two of the libraries, Fisher and Sci-tech. And another option, the long route option in Figure 7, has one end outside the libraries reach in order to reach more users at the southern-east part of the campus and it comes with a cost of operation because of more distance it will take.
FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS INCLUDING HOW PERSUASIVE YOUR ARGUMENT IS
Considering the criteria, I set in part 2, both short and long route as the following result.
- Short Route It passes all libraries, has the reach of 46,698 users and total distance at 1.7 kilometers
- Long Route It passes all libraries, has the reach of 55,078 users and total distance at 2.2 kilometers
So the short route is shorter save more cost of running but serve 8,380 (55078–46698) less than the long route while the long route has 500 meters longer using more cost but serves more users. In order to pick the option I use the users served per kilometers number and the rounded result is as followed; Short Route = 27,469 users/km. Long Route = 25,035 users/km
From the result, I would recommend the university to use the short route as it is more efficient. Although it serves fewer users, it saves a lot of running costs. Besides, from the scale bar, it took only 200 to 300 meters to walk from the southeast part of the campus to the Sci-Tech library’s stop which I believe most of the users are willing to do so.
Further recommendation
The bus route not only could serve the transportation purpose but it also could serve as an important facility to support the campus expansion in the future and be another activity that students can release their stress by riding the tram and watch the heritage landscape of the University of Sydney. It needs more research to conclude again if the trail has multiple purposes that cannot evaluate by the number.
