Methodology
Tyne and Wear, as a medium-sized metropolitan area, was selected
for the study, as representative of a city outside London
(the capital of the UK) that benefited from multi-modal options
for commuting. At the early stages of this project, in 2007, Edina,
UK Borders, and CasWeb services offered free maps and British
Census 2001 data for academic purposes. These free resources enabled
the design of a Tyne and Wear GIS, which was then used
innovatively for sample selection. In particular it was possible to
select a sample with certain characteristics.
3.1. The Tyne and Wear GIS
Topographic and LSOA boundary maps of Tyne and Wear and
British Census 2001 data were combined using ArcMap software
by ESRI. and the Tyne and Wear GIS was created for this study (a
useful manual on how to create a new project file with various layers
can be found on the ESRI (2013) website). As the purpose of the
project was to study commuters’ travel choices and their travel
behaviour while commuting, the census attributes of interest were
related to the transport context of the study. This included the
transport mode used for travel-to-work, car accessibility, and the
employment rate in the potential sampling areas.