Research of pendular migration in the St. Petersburg?s agglomeration

The population of the Petersburg's city agglomeration on January 1, 2012 was about 5,9 million people, the territory area -- 11,6 thousand km ². The borders, spatial and structural features of the Petersburg's city agglomeration are defined by JSC "Peterburgsky NIPIGrad" within works on justification of the design solutions of St. Petersburg Master plan 2005 As the core of the Petersburg's agglomeration, the central part of the city St. Petersburg with a very high building density was defined (the total area of 65 thousand hectares, about 50% of the whole city territory), including the historical center, industrial belt, regions of an industrial housing estate. For agglomerations considerable scales of pendular migrations are typical, thus it is considered that not fewer than 90-95% of daily trips with the labor, business, educational and cultural and community purposes are made within external borders of the agglomeration. The zone of intensive recreational cyclic migrations usually also doesn't go beyond external borders of the city agglomeration, but the share of all the number of such trips within these borders is usually smaller, than in case of labor trips : 75?80%. When studying the ways of participants movement, one of the tools of the measurement of pendular migration volumes is the registration of the passenger traffic and the vehicles streams on the border of the agglomeration core. The registration results can be also used while creating a mathematical model describing the formation and distribution of the streams in the agglomeration transport network. The authors of the present article used the materials of the passenger traffic research on the different means of transport conducted for the Leningrad administration in 1987 and also the materials of the research completed by JSC "Peterburgsky NIPIGrad" together with St. Petersburg Means of communication State University in 2003 and 2011. The total passenger traffic on all entrances to the Petersburg's agglomeration core during three hours in the morning period of the working day peak loadings was in 2011 about 169 thousand people, which was 18% more, than in 2003 and 43% more, than in 1987. The exit stream also increased and became about 97 thousand passengers which was 37% more than in 2003 and 11% more than in 1987. It should be noted that the increase in the number of the resident population could not affect the increase in the volumes of passengers transportation between the agglomeration core and surrounding settlements. This indicator just now is starting to reach the level of 1987. Probably, the growth of passengers transportation volume is connected with an increase in the general population mobility and with a change in the difference of migratory capacities of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region.