Route related data of shopping centre visitors and geographical information systems

Pedestrian route information can support different research activities such as the calculation of economic performances of shopping streets, the evaluation of parking policy measures, and the development of pedestrian design standards. These research activities are helpful in planning and designing shopping centres. Pedestrians' routes are used to measure walking distances, calculate other route related data, and estimate pedestrians' densities. To use route related data efficiently, it is necessary to capture the observed routes of pedestrians in some kind of computer system. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) might offer an opportunity to deal with route related data because they can handle spatial and non-spatial data for example of line segments. However, very few GIS offer tools to enter, store, analyze and display route related data. In the new version of TransCAD a special Route System module is implemented to handle routes. The route system stores the routes, the different links routes are made up, and the possible stops on the route in separate tables that can be analyzed and displayed in a map. This paper describes the structure and the contents of pedestrians' route information as it can be used in various research projects. From these research projects some general requirements to handle route related, are extracted. Special attention is paid to the way TransCAD deals with routes. A parking research conducted in the main shopping centre of Veldhoven is used to describe and illustrate the possibilities of route related data of pedestrians, and evaluate the possibilities TransCAD offers to deal with this kind of data