Using circular statistics to explore the geography of the journey to work

This article introduces the application of circular statistics to an analysis of 'journey to work' (JTW) data for the South East Queensland (SEQ) region in Australia. The JTW data include the total number of journeys between an origin (home) and destination zone (work) across SEQ. Using bespoke tools developed in a GIS environment the direction and frequency of each journey is first calculated. Using the outputs from this process, two descriptive measures - namely the circular mean and circular variance - are then computed and the results presented. Analysis of the mapped outputs shows strong JTW patterns that are readily detectable and visualised using a combination of GIS and circular statistics.