Methology

I assume that people make their decisions on choosing residential locations are transit-oriented. Accessibility to frequent public transit and convenient living facilities will be the crucial factor to new comers who just start a life in Metro Vancouver. Based on this assumption, I employed the following constrain and factors to perform Multicriteria Evaluation from the perspective of young immigration family and the perspective of international students who could be either in secondary school or university.

All of the collected data files were first imported into Idrisi, and then use GVRD landuse layer as the base map to rasterize all layers to the same format.  

Constraints

Residential area

The increasing rent area only expect to occur in the residential region. Therefore, I used Reclass module to separate classed residential area with all the others. [Map] 

Factors

Travel distance to schools through FTN transit (unit: Grid Cell Equivalents)

It is the cost distance image that represents the travel time distance from all collected school locations by using Frequent Transit Network. It was derived from FTN vector file and school location vector file. [Map]

Travel distance to CBD through FTN transit (unit: GCE)

Another cost distance image that indicates the travel time distance from downtown area by taking Frequent Transit Network. The shape of downtown area was extraced from CT boundary file. [Map]

Walking distance to schools (unit: GEC)

It represents travel distance from school points through all existing routes. [Map]

Distance to Skytrain (unit: meter)

This image shows the direct distance from all Skytrain lines. [Map]

Distance to FTN transit (unit: meter)

It shows the distance from all corridors of Frequent Transit Network, which includes bus routes, Skytrain, Seabus and West Coast Express. [Map]

Most immigration communities (unit: class)

It is the Boolean image that shows the five communities have most immigration per capita at the Census Tract dimension. [Map]

Apartments and townhouses (unit:class)

This image shows different types of residential area in Metro Vancouver. [Map]