Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GREENTRAVEL (GREENER URBAN TRAVEL ENVIRONMENTS FOR EVERYONE: From measured wellbeing impacts to Big Data analytics)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2023-01-01 do 2025-06-30
Greenery plays an important role in sustaining healthy, biodiverse and liveable cities. The benefits of urban green spaces are well documented, yet little is known about the effects and benefits of exposure to greenery during the everyday travel of urban residents as they move around the city, and how equitably these are distributed.
GREENTRAVEL will produce novel understandings of the importance of greenery in urban travel environments and the travel experiences of people. The project will leverage advanced urban informatics methods to examine the availability and seasonal dynamics of green everyday active travel environments, understand their importance to the health and wellbeing of urban residents, and identify solutions to promote fairness and equity.
By integrating cutting-edge technologies with traditional research methods, GREENTRAVEL aims to generate transformational and actionable knowledge on why travel environment greenery matters, where and when it is available, and for whom it is available. It will produce completely new open methods and transferable procedures for analysing green travel environments in Europe and beyond.
GREENTRAVEL has 4 objectives:
1. To understand the associations between travel-related green exposure and perceived and measured wellbeing through participatory GIS, laboratory immersive Virtual Reality (VR) control trials and in-situ experimentation.
2. To develop new approaches for mapping the urban greenery of travel environments dynamically and from the human perspective by taking advantage of extensive street-view imagery and advanced computer vision techniques to map and examine greenery features and environments from features relevant to human perception across different seasons.
3. To model the everyday mobility patterns and estimate green exposure during travel by utilizing mobile Big Data, and detailed traffic route and public transport data to model urban mobility flows across seasons at the individual street level to generate green exposure measures across cities and at high spatial resolution.
4. To understand the equity of access and exposure to green travel environments, and to prioritize locations of greening actions through the analysis of detailed spatial data on socioeconomic variation, everyday mobility flows and human perceptions of greenery, and their integration into advanced Zonation prioritisation and decision-support software.
GREENTRAVEL will produce novel understandings of the importance of greenery in urban travel environments and the travel experiences of people. The project will leverage advanced urban informatics methods to examine the availability and seasonal dynamics of green everyday active travel environments, understand their importance to the health and wellbeing of urban residents, and identify solutions to promote fairness and equity.
By integrating cutting-edge technologies with traditional research methods, GREENTRAVEL aims to generate transformational and actionable knowledge on why travel environment greenery matters, where and when it is available, and for whom it is available. It will produce completely new open methods and transferable procedures for analysing green travel environments in Europe and beyond.
GREENTRAVEL has 4 objectives:
1. To understand the associations between travel-related green exposure and perceived and measured wellbeing through participatory GIS, laboratory immersive Virtual Reality (VR) control trials and in-situ experimentation.
2. To develop new approaches for mapping the urban greenery of travel environments dynamically and from the human perspective by taking advantage of extensive street-view imagery and advanced computer vision techniques to map and examine greenery features and environments from features relevant to human perception across different seasons.
3. To model the everyday mobility patterns and estimate green exposure during travel by utilizing mobile Big Data, and detailed traffic route and public transport data to model urban mobility flows across seasons at the individual street level to generate green exposure measures across cities and at high spatial resolution.
4. To understand the equity of access and exposure to green travel environments, and to prioritize locations of greening actions through the analysis of detailed spatial data on socioeconomic variation, everyday mobility flows and human perceptions of greenery, and their integration into advanced Zonation prioritisation and decision-support software.
GREENTRAVEL has progressed considerably over the past 24 months. We have published 6 peer reviewed articles, with 4 additional articles under review, and supported 1 finalised masters’ dissertation since the inception of the project.
The Project is progressing well against all objectives. Major activities and achievements to date include:
1. Implementation of a large-scale representative PPGIS survey across five cities (Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Greater Copenhagen, Greater London, Munich and Las Palmas) to examine individual experiences, greenery preferences and perceptions of environmental exposures during everyday active travel. Results show that there is a strong positive relationship between greenspace and pleasant travel places, while increasing greenspace delivers greater perceived multi-sensory benefits.
2. Development of an integrated and immersive Virtual Reality system that allows for controlled experimentation on stated and measured impacts of green travel environments and seasonality. The integrated VR system and environment is equipped with devices measuring eye movement, facial expressions and electrodermal activity as indicators of interest and arousal.
3. Progressed the development of a novel Human Perspective Greenery Index by advancing the mapping of street level greenery across multiple fronts, including: 1) capturing greenery at street level; 2) capturing temporal variation in greenery levels; and, 3) integrating human perceptions of greenery.
4. Developed and demonstrated the viability of an advanced environmental exposure routing platform – Green Paths 2.0 - that considers the quality of the route environment, including its greenery and can suggest routes, which improve the exposure on the way. The tool is designed both for citizen and professional use.
The Project is progressing well against all objectives. Major activities and achievements to date include:
1. Implementation of a large-scale representative PPGIS survey across five cities (Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Greater Copenhagen, Greater London, Munich and Las Palmas) to examine individual experiences, greenery preferences and perceptions of environmental exposures during everyday active travel. Results show that there is a strong positive relationship between greenspace and pleasant travel places, while increasing greenspace delivers greater perceived multi-sensory benefits.
2. Development of an integrated and immersive Virtual Reality system that allows for controlled experimentation on stated and measured impacts of green travel environments and seasonality. The integrated VR system and environment is equipped with devices measuring eye movement, facial expressions and electrodermal activity as indicators of interest and arousal.
3. Progressed the development of a novel Human Perspective Greenery Index by advancing the mapping of street level greenery across multiple fronts, including: 1) capturing greenery at street level; 2) capturing temporal variation in greenery levels; and, 3) integrating human perceptions of greenery.
4. Developed and demonstrated the viability of an advanced environmental exposure routing platform – Green Paths 2.0 - that considers the quality of the route environment, including its greenery and can suggest routes, which improve the exposure on the way. The tool is designed both for citizen and professional use.
GREENTRAVEL has generated five major advances to date that go beyond the state-of-the-art.
First, we have published in top journals unforeseen, high-resolution assessments on the availability of greenery during travel across large European cities (see Klein et al. 2024 and Willberg et al. 2024).
Second, we have conducted an extensive, representative survey in all five focus cities (Helsinki, Copenhagen, Munich, London, Las Palmas) that improves our understanding on the importance of greenery during everyday trip behaviour (making the trip, mode choice, route choice). The survey went beyond the original plan to incorporate participatory mapping, which allowed us to collect spatially explicit information on perceived pleasant and unpleasant environments for urban residents. The results are published as open data.
Third, we have built controllable and immersive VR environments, which go beyond the state-of-the-art in multiple respects. They integrate motion with participants being able to cycle inside the environment, seasonal variation with environments adjusted to varying greenery levels and stress monitoring with participants’ physiological responses being measured on a second-by-second basis.
Fourth, we have developed a state-of-the-art route planning software, Green Paths 2.0 which is unique in its capabilities allowing flexibility to multiple environmental exposure types, scalability for mass calculation and transferability across study areas.
Fifth, we have advanced the mapping of greenery and pleasantness of everyday travel environments using street view imagery. We have conducted a broad review of ways to map greenery using street view imagery (Hasanzadeh, submitted). We have also moved beyond the original plan and started exploring the possibilities of Large Language Models in interpreting the pleasantness of the travel environments. The first paper is out and is a first of its kind (Malekzadeh et al. 2025). The work opens completely new avenues for collecting data on travel environment qualities.
First, we have published in top journals unforeseen, high-resolution assessments on the availability of greenery during travel across large European cities (see Klein et al. 2024 and Willberg et al. 2024).
Second, we have conducted an extensive, representative survey in all five focus cities (Helsinki, Copenhagen, Munich, London, Las Palmas) that improves our understanding on the importance of greenery during everyday trip behaviour (making the trip, mode choice, route choice). The survey went beyond the original plan to incorporate participatory mapping, which allowed us to collect spatially explicit information on perceived pleasant and unpleasant environments for urban residents. The results are published as open data.
Third, we have built controllable and immersive VR environments, which go beyond the state-of-the-art in multiple respects. They integrate motion with participants being able to cycle inside the environment, seasonal variation with environments adjusted to varying greenery levels and stress monitoring with participants’ physiological responses being measured on a second-by-second basis.
Fourth, we have developed a state-of-the-art route planning software, Green Paths 2.0 which is unique in its capabilities allowing flexibility to multiple environmental exposure types, scalability for mass calculation and transferability across study areas.
Fifth, we have advanced the mapping of greenery and pleasantness of everyday travel environments using street view imagery. We have conducted a broad review of ways to map greenery using street view imagery (Hasanzadeh, submitted). We have also moved beyond the original plan and started exploring the possibilities of Large Language Models in interpreting the pleasantness of the travel environments. The first paper is out and is a first of its kind (Malekzadeh et al. 2025). The work opens completely new avenues for collecting data on travel environment qualities.