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This thesis examines factors that influence the daily number of trip departures and arrivals at over 100 hubs comprising Hamilton, Ontario’s (Canada) bike share program – SoBi (Social Bicycles) Hamilton. SoBi operates all year, and during its first year of operation (April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016), over 200,000 trips were generated on SoBi bikes. The study utilizes data from SoBi Hamilton, the 2011 Canadian Census, the 2011 Transportation Tomorrow Survey, Environment Canada, and Hamilton’s Open Source Data initiative. From these master files, daily trips, meteorological data, temporal variables, socio-demographic and built environment attributes were obtained to generate a comprehensive suite of explanatory variables to explain the daily trips at each hub. A multilevel regression approach was used to understand the associations between bike share usage at each hub and each suite of explanatory variables at two temporal scales: total daily trips at hubs and total daily trips across four time periods of the day. Findings demonstrate that weather and temporal attributes play a significant role in trip departures and arrivals. In addition, hub attributes vary in significance throughout different times of the day for trip departures and arrivals. Overall, the methodology and findings allow us to identify factors that increase SoBi usage, which can also benefit city planners and engineers who are implementing a bike share system with the goal of maximizing bike share activity in urban centers. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

This thesis examines the published writing about the British Caribbean, by white women, in the years 1770-1845. The study includes travel accounts, published histories, natural histories, diaries, letters and novels, which represent a range of views on slavery from anti-slavery to pro-slavery. White women's writing from the Caribbean remains a neglected topic, despite pioneering work about North America, and some of the texts I examine have not previously been used in a study of slavery in the British West Indies. As well as using these `new' sources, the thesis also makes a theoretical contribution to the study of slavery in the Caribbean. Texts are deconstructed in order to analyse the powerful images of `race' and racism present in women's writing. It is argued that white women travellers and novelists played an important role in imperialism in contributing to contemporary discourses on racism and white superiority. I suggest that even `anti'-slavery texts contained powerful negative images of slaves and of the free black and mixed-origins populations. The thesis also suggests that white women accepted white male patriarchy in slave society, and even contributed to their own gender oppression by their glorification of stereotypical female gender characteristics.

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