Marie Chollet
Sinem Secer
UP 504: Quantitative Planning Methods
Assignment 6
March 18, 2008Political Orientation and Transportation Habits
in Developed Countries
5.
Context and overview
Our study is a term project performed for a graduate-level statistics class in the urban planning program of the University of Michigan over a period of 1.5 month. In the time allocated, we want to analyze the relations between the government’s composition and orientation and the population’s behavior in terms of mobility in developed countries. We will use basic statistical methods and secondary data found on government’s or organization’s websites to perform our analysis.
Research question
Our research question is: “Do the composition of the national assembly and the allocation of public funds to the transit sector have an influence on transportation habits within the country?”
Hypotheses
1. The political orientation of a country has an impact on transportation habits in “developed” countries.
2. The more the country has left-wing or ecological parties’ representatives, the more transit and non-motorized transportation will weight in citizen’s modal choice.
3. The bigger the proportion of public funds allocated to public transportation is, the better and the more used public transportation network will be.
Unit of analysis
The unit of analysis is the country. We chose this unit because it is the level where major decisions related to transportation are made in most developed countries. Moreover, the national level is the best to represent the political orientation in democratic country because of the presence of an assembly.
Data required and sources
Our data concerning the political orientation of countries will be number of seats of left-wing and ecological parties in the national assemblies (CIA World Factbook). Concerning the budget for public transportation, we will either use national websites or the Eurostat website. In terms of transportation habits, we will use diverse indicators like numbers of cars per capita, passengers-kilometers in different modes (cars, buses, and trains), rail and road tracks divided by total area, share of the non-motorized transportation in the mobility mix, and so on. The data sources will be national or international Office of Statistics Website and other organization like the European Union Road Federation (annual European road statistics) and the International Union of Railways.
Methodology
1. Choose the countries to include according to data availability and political structure (about 25)
2. Create indicators that are relevant to our issue using available data
3. Build an excel spreadsheet with the data collected and identify missing cases
4. Perform multiple regressions to determine if our assumptions are true and to see which variables are the most relevant to our study and prepare graphics showing our results
5. Create a webpage describing our study, showing our numerical and visual results and providing a verbal explanation to it.
Anticipated results
We think that we will find a strong positive correlation between the number of left and ecological seats in the assembly and the public and non-motorized transportation indicators. We also expect that the amount of budget allocated to public transportation will be correlated to the indicators of sustainable mobility.
Data sources
.
- Bureau of Transportation Statistics:- Canada’s National Statistics Agency:
http://www.statcan.ca/menu-en.htm
- CIA World Factbook:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
- European Office of Statistics (Eurostat):
- The European Union Road Federation:
- International Union of Railways:
http://www.uic.asso.fr/?changeLang=en&lang=fr
- Japan Statistics Bureau: