Potential Path Areas and Activity Spaces in Application: A Review

Abstract

The potential path area (PPA) and activity space (AS) concepts play a central role in the substantial amount of applied research focusing on the quantitative analysis and description of people's spatial behaviour. Given this large literature, and the surprising lack of a formal review of the research, the time is ripe for a systematic review. This paper examines how the key concepts of PPAs and ASs have evolved, how they have been applied, what issues need to be resolved, and potential areas for future research. The review begins with the main theoretical developments influencing the applied use of these methods, and continues with a categorization of the literature across three dimensions — research domain, methods of calculation and application purpose. We find that the methods have been used not only in the core originating fields of travel behaviour and transport geography, but also in health, criminology and demography, and are growing fastest in health. The methods have been applied to a number of purposes with applications to accessibility the most common and the fastest growing. Demonstrated interest in these methods, along with the technologies and data to facilitate them, suggests a bright future for the use of PPAs and ASs in the social sciences.

Keywords:

• activity spaces
• potential path areas
• travel behaviour
• transport geography
• space-time geography
• behavioural geography

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Christopher Harding for his comments on an early version of this paper, as well as two anonymous reviewers. They would also like to thank Tyler Larsen and Sean Reid at the University of Utah for collecting and performing a preliminary review of the literature. Thanks also to the National Institute for Transportation and Communities for funding these bright undergraduate research assistants. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This research was supported by the Canada Research Chairs Program under Grant number 950-224364 and the National Science Foundation under Grant number 1339462.