Introduction

EVO Car Share is a popular means of transport among students and people who do not own a car; gas, insurance and parking are all included. EVO allows its users to rent a car for an entire day at a cost of $90. Nevertheless, there is a limited number of “free” kilometres per day. The $90 fee covers 200km/day, and for every kilometre driven over that limit a fee of $0.45/km is applied. EVO users, nevertheless, are keen users of such this system, and EVO is often used as a means of transport for day road trips around Vancouver.

The goal of this project is to model the Least Cost Paths that EVO drivers can use to go on 4 different popular day trip destinations while at the same time going through points of “Activities and Attractions” listed by HelloBC, the official travel website for British Columbia. The 4 day trip destinations selected are Cultus Lake, Deep Cove and Harrison Hot Springs, and Whistler. In addition, the project will also aim at identifying zones of driving of 100 km, 150 km, and 200 km from downtown Vancouver, to enable EVO users to have a quick idea of the cost of their day trip, considering in which zone their destination is located. Furthermore, in addition to creating a set of maps for the EVO users to help plan their trips, a list of attractions along each route to the destination plan will be gathered.

The first step in carrying out the analysis will be to create a network dataset from the roads layer, from which the driving zones of 100, 150 and 200 km will be calculated. However, in order to find the shortest roads that go through attraction points, it will be required to create a cost surface by assigning different friction costs to attraction, roads, and non-road zones. Once the cost surface has been calculated, it will be possible to determine the shortest path using the Cost Path tool. Furthermore, the least cost path generated will be compared to the routes calculated using the Network Analyst in order to assess the effectiveness of the Cost Path in going through attraction points.