Andrea Mikkila

Andrea graduated with a BES in Planning from Waterloo in 2013, and has had three years of planning experience working with Grand River Transit. Her research uses GPS data from study participants to model travel behaviour in the Region of Waterloo. As a graduate student, she has been a teaching assistant for the Urban Design, Environmental Law and Health Planning courses. She actively takes part in intramural dodgeball, running and rock climbing, and enjoys playing piano, flute, and video games.

Andrea is being co-supervised by Jeff Casello and Robert Feick.

Project

Establishing baseline tour behaviour through smartphone data collection in the Region of Waterloo

Using a smartphone application developed by other University of Waterloo students, passive GPS data will be collected from voluntary participants' phones. The app will collect anonymous participant IDs, latitude, longitude, altitude, acceleration and time stamps of all GPS points. These data will be processed using an automated Python script to determine the number of stops a person makes throughout a tour within the Region. These data may provide a baseline for future additional research and the correlation between land use and pedestrian behaviour.