Archive for Survey Results

Coursera, Statistics and R

March 11, 2013 Collaborative Consumption, Happy Cities, Survey Results No comments
Box plot showing Happiness vs the annual cost of Travel in Euros

Happiness Vs Annual Cost of Travel

Things have been a little quiet around here lately, mostly because I’ve been working hard at mastering the art of statistics, specifically the R statistical programming language. Despite the fact that I’m enrolled in a university with all the usual access to courses that entails, it’s simpler and easier for me to just learn the language online via the courses offered by Coursera.

The graph above is just a quick illustration really of something that takes two or three minutes to put together in R. The WHO wellbeing score is across the bottom. Happier people score closer to 25. The Y-Axis is the annual cost of travel for respondents. The width of the boxes shows how many people fall into each Happiness level. Overall the graph really shows that there’s probably no link between how much you spend on travel and how happy you are.

R is fantastic. If you’ve never programmed before, it’s difficult to get into, but it’s free and open source and incredibly powerful. Even just scratching the barest surface, the possibilities it presents are amazing. I’m just getting to the point now where it’s worth playing around with my own data. My favourite things so far is just the ability to clean the data up using a program. Even when the data changes, for instance if I add new points to the openpaths data, I can consistently carry out the same steps and in seconds, everything is ready for me to start using GIS or making graphs. I can have one programme written that deletes all the people with only ten points, and another programme written that gets rid of the points outside Ireland and something else that calculates all my distances. When you have over a hundred thousand data points and excel works at a snails pace, that’s brilliant. I’m not quite there with the regression models and such yet, but I’m getting there. Watch this space.

Coursera itself fascinates me too. University level courses available to everyone. I’m in a university, and they can’t compete with the convenience and standard that coursera is offering me. The courses are tough. Weekly lectures, weekly quizzes, assignments and the pace is very fast. The continuous assessment really forces you to keep up with the course, no saving everything for a last minute cramming session in week 8, if you don’t log in and spend a good six hours a week you won’t get your certificate at the end. On the downside, the online nature of the course forces most testing into the multiple choice format beloved of Americans but which I personally find extremely frustrating, but they are also starting to get there with peer to peer marking of assignments. The collaborative process emerging at a new level with new technology.

People Share Cars

November 24, 2012 Collaborative Consumption, Survey Results, Sustainable Transport One comment

How People Use Cars?There is a kind of assumption in research, in business, in the media, that people are fairly straightforward in their use of cars. If they own a car, they drive it and it’s usually the only car they drive. Some of that group would obviously travel in a spouses car occasionally. If they don’t own a car they don’t travel in cars that much, though maybe a spouses car.

My survey was deliberately designed to capture complexity in private vehicle travel. It first asked if you’d travelled in one, two or more than two private vehicles in the last two weeks. Then it asked you about the vehicle you travelled in most. If you said you travelled in two vehicles it asked about the vehicle you travelled in second most, and if you said you travelled in more than two vehicles it asked about all of them at once. Yesterday I put people into the 28 different possible categories based on their answers and their travel patterns. Everything from “travelled in one car only, which they owned” to “travelled in one car and one non-car, owned neither, car travelled in most”.

Most of the time you split people into these sort of categories from a survey and you get 40 – 50% in the largest category, 10- 25% in the next two or three and maybe 1% in the rest of them.

Not the case.

Completely not the case. The highest group was people who travelled in one car only, which they did not own at 20% followed by people who travelled in one car only which they did own at 19%. After that there are another 5 categories in the 5 -20% range. The smaller categories pretty much always involve non-cars, i.e. people travelling in motorcycles and vans.

This is awkward for the model I’m trying to construct at the moment, but it’s excellent both for my research and for the future as a whole. Less than one in four people in the survey travelled only in vehicles they owned, and even those people regularly had passengers or took public transport.

We don’t need to persuade people to share cars, they already do.

The Costs of Car Ownership

October 3, 2012 Happy Cities, Survey Results, Sustainable Transport One comment

 

Cost of Travel in Dublin

I’ve talked about the high cost of car ownership before, but I think it’s worthy of a follow up post, especially since I’ve delved into the numbers a little further. The chart above looks at people who answered the survey, lived in Dublin, were employed and who reported a travel style of active, public or private car. I’ve narrowed it down deliberately to try to get, not a homogeneous group, but at least a group of people who are making similar choices about where to live, how to travel and where to socialise.

First in the table are two personal characteristics – age and household size. Car owners are on average older than non-car owners, hardly surprising. Active and Public Transport users who own a car also tend to live in slightly larger households than those who don’t. Do people buy a car because they have children and therefore need one? Do they save money by sharing a house with more people and spend the extra on the comfort of having a car?

Next up, I want to look at the characteristics of travel – the number of km/year, journeys/year and travel time/year. The number of journeys per year and the number of hours /year are remarkably similar across all three categories. The difference between 950 trips a year and 1000 trips a year is just one trip a week, pretty small. There is a difference between car travellers and active/public travellers in terms of the distance travelled. People who travel by car generally travel about half again as much as those who mostly use other methods. That’s a pretty big difference, it may illustrate the lack of cross-city bus routes in Dublin. If your journey to work is longer, e.g. not on a route straight into the city centre, you travel by car and that’s reflected in your overall distance. It might also represent lots of trips ferrying people around, or any number of other things.

The biggest thing however is the high cost of owning a car. For the full sample,  The additional capital cost (depreciation and opportunity cost) associated with owning a car is €1,560.82 per year, but when you add in the costs of petrol, insurance etc. that figure rises to €3,477.51 per year. For a similar amount of journeys and a similar amount of time, that’s some difference. The difference also doesn’t disappear when you look at the per kilometre cost of travel, the average cost per kilometre travelled is 42.5c for car owners vs 18.6c for non-car owners. While some of that is because active and public transport users who don’t use their cars much have very high costs for the limited mileage they do in their cars, even car owners who mostly drive come out at 39.1c per km.

It clearly pays to live somewhere you don’t need to own a car.

Owning a Car Doesn’t Make You Happier, Owning a Bicycle Does

August 14, 2012 Happy Cities, Survey Results, Sustainable Transport 2 comments

It’s a bit glib, but that is essentially the conclusion that has come out of the first paper I’ve written from the survey data. In Dublin, people who travel actively (cycle or walk) are happier than people who use public transport or travel by car.

Things that don’t affect your happiness include:

  • how far you travel
  • how often you travel
  • how much you spent travelling
  • whether or not you own a car
  • whether or not you have access to a car
  • how much time you spend travelling
  • being a student vs working

Things that do affect your happiness include:

  • having active travel as your dominant mode of travel (makes you happier)
  • how you perceive your health (if you think your health is good or very good, you’re a whole lot likelier to be happier)
  • being a man (men are slightly happier)
  • being unemployed vs being a student or working (you’re a lot more likely to be unhappy if you’re depressed)

The Fittest Parts of Dublin?

July 25, 2012 Happy Cities, Survey Results, Sustainable Transport 3 comments
Physical Activity by Area, Dublin

The Fittest Parts of Dublin?

I have to say, when I first drew this map, I was amazed. Every other map I’ve drawn had small differences, the sort of differences where you look at it and wonder if there’s actually a difference or not.

This one didn’t.

The two maps show average physical activity in hours per year by the areas of Dublin. The areas of Dublin are based on the Electoral Areas Maps. The map on the level shows average physical activity excluding the walking and cycling people do to get where they want to go, the map on the right shows average physical activity including all walking and cycling.

The stark difference between levels of physical activity in areas like Swords and Clondalkin vs areas like Donaghmede, Stillorgan, Mulhuddart really stands out. Without counting transport the difference between the worst performing areas and the best performing area is a factor of three. When you include travel the difference goes up still further, to about five fold.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of the difference. Any ideas what might be influencing it?

The Dublin Happiness Map

June 18, 2012 Happy Cities, Survey Results No comments
The Happiness Map of Dublin

The Happiness Map of Dublin

 

 

This is the happiness map of Dublin, a raw data look at where people are reporting the highest levels of wellbeing. As before the red areas have higher wellbeing levels, the green areas have lower wellbeing levels. However the scale of this map is different to the all Ireland Happiness Map to make the variations more visible. This map is also based on answers to the transport and happiness surveys where respondents gave details on where they lived and their wellbeing.

Number of Responses by LEA

Number of Responses by LEA

To present the data, I’ve grouped the responses by Local Electoral Areas. You can see how the boundaries and area names work here. I think it provides a reasonable compromise between having enough data points in an area and illustrating the differences between different areas of the city. Dún Laoghaire seems to have a mysterious habit of disappearing, but it should all be that orange colour you can see in what remains.

As before it comes with the caveat that this is raw data, and that the number of responses is not as high as I would like. You can see an illustration of this by clicking on the thumbnail map, or by looking at the table below.

If you have a spare two minutes you can contribute to the map by taking the very short happiness survey here.

And in case you’re interested, this is a break down of the average happiness values and the number of responses received by Electoral Area:

Local Electoral Area

Average of Happiness

Number of Responses

Tallaght Central

15.04

47

Dun Laoghaire

15.00

54

Crumlin-Kimmage

14.61

82

South West Inner City

14.57

146

Mulhuddart

14.52

23

Pembroke-Rathmines

14.52

320

Cabra-Glasnevin

14.32

93

South East Inner City

14.23

217

Rathfarnham

14.22

65

Howth-Malahide

14.18

56

Glencullen-Sandyford

14.03

59

Clontarf

13.99

87

Stillorgan

13.96

46

Castleknock

13.94

51

Clondalkin

13.91

22

North Inner City

13.84

207

Blackrock

13.78

55

Dundrum

13.67

57

Artane-Whitehall

13.53

32

Ballyfermot-Drimnagh

13.42

24

Balbriggan

13.38

42

Ballybrack

13.35

40

Ballymun-Finglas

13.18

28

Lucan

12.85

41

Donaghmede

12.79

29

Swords

12.75

48

Tallaght South

12.63

19

 

The Happiness Map of Ireland

June 12, 2012 Happy Cities, Survey Results No comments
The Happiness Map of Ireland

The Happiness Map of Ireland

If you have a spare two minutes, you can contribute to the map by taking the very short happiness survey. 

So this is it, the happiness map of Ireland. The red counties have the highest wellbeing, the blue counties have the lowest wellbeing, and the orange – yellow – green are somewhere in between. It’s based on answers to the transport survey where respondents gave details on where they lived and of their wellbeing.

Number of Responses by County

Number of Responses by County

The whole map comes with the major caveat that for a lot of counties I have very few data points. The counties with the fewest data points are also the the counties coming up at the extremes, places like Offaly and South Tipperary only have two or three respondents.

So yes, as always I’d like more data. . .

That said, for the areas where I do have a reasonable amount of data, the urban areas seem to be slightly happier than the less urban areas. Dublin for instance is slightly happier than the surrounding commuter counties, and Cork City is rating as happier than Cork county. On the other hand, Galway City and County are pretty much identical.

Men Vs Women – Travel Style

May 14, 2012 Happy Cities, Survey Results, Sustainable Transport No comments

Do men and women travel differently? The answer would seem to be yes. Men are far more likely to cycle or walk then women.

Travel Style

Female

Male

Average

Active

29.7%

41.8%

35.0%

Car

30.0%

28.5%

29.3%

Public Transport

40.3%

29.7%

35.7%

Travel Styles

May 10, 2012 Survey Results, Sustainable Transport No comments

A few weeks back I divided all my survey responses into four categories according to their dominant mode of transport. The four categories are:

  • Active Travellers – those who mostly travel by bicycle or on foot
  • Public Transport – those who mostly travel by bus or train
  • Cars – those who mostly travel in private cars
  • Other – those who mostly travel in vans, motorcycles and even a few who mostly travel by taxi.

The process was relatively straightforward – look at the number of journeys made in each category. If the most frequent category was 20% more then the next most frequent category, then it was labelled the most dominant mode of transport. If the top two were within 20% of each other, then the furthest distance travelled was the “dominant” form.

The survey wasn’t representative, so it doesn’t matter much, but the numbers came out roughly even i.e. 750 – 950 in each of the three main categories, which means I have a fairly decent sample in each category.

Why are the travel styles important?

Well for the purposes of this blog, they’re an interesting and easy way to talk about who travels and how they travel. For the purposes of my research I’m modelling changes in travel, and the best way I’ve found to approach that is to model changes for each style of traveller.

The High Cost of Car Ownership

May 9, 2012 Survey Results, Sustainable Transport No comments
High Cost of Car Ownership

How much is your car costing you?

For the last month or so I’ve been working on transport costs, specifically what it costs to own a car. Now the survey didn’t ask directly about how much your car was worth, but it did ask about what your cars year and engine size/tax band were.

From a combination of sources (Department of Transport Fleet Statistics, Vehicle Registration Tax Prices, SIMI figures, Car Sales Databases) I’ve estimated a value for every vehicle owned by someone who responded to the survey. Because the VRT is useful that way, I’ve also estimated the value of each of these vehicles in one years time. From that I’ve worked out how much these cars are costing respondents as follows:

Car Cost = Annual Costs + Fortnightly Costs*26 + Opportunity Costs + Depreciation

  • Annual Costs – What was reported in the survey for maintenance, insurance, NCT etc.
  • Fortnightly Costs – What was reported in the survey for petrol and incidental expenses – what could be claimed back
  • Opportunity Costs – 5% of the current value of the car. This allows for people paying interest or if you own the car outright, where else you could put the money
  • Depreciation – Value of the car now – value of the car in one years time.

How did that work out?

Well for people who owned at least one car, the average cost was €4,281.

  • Annual Costs – €1,152
  • Fortnightly Costs – €1,775
  • Opportunity Costs – €278
  • Depreciation – €1,075

The average total transport spend for someone who owns a car is €4,735 vs €1,257* for someone who doesn’t.

*Note – these numbers are for buses, trains and car travel. I need to go back and include taxis which averages about €10/week across the respondents and are likely to reduce the difference somewhat. There are also a few other small tweaks related to people who use motorcycles, purchase bikes etc. that need to be made.

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