The benefits of a high-resolution analysis of transit accessibility

Abstract

Accessibility is an important consideration in sustainable mobility policies, particularly for transit users. Measures suggested in the literature are based on coarse aggregate spatial resolution of traffic analysis zones that is sufficient for managing car travels only. To reflect a human door-to-door travel, transit accessibility demands an explicit view of the location of origin, transit stops and destination, as well as of the temporal fit between transit lines timetable and traveler's needs. We thus estimate transit accessibility based on mode-specific travel times and corresponding paths, including walking and waiting, at the resolution of individual buildings and stops. Car accessibility is estimated at a high resolution too. A novel representation of transit network as a graph is proposed. This representation includes all modal components of a transit travel -walking, waiting at a stop, transit ride, transfers between lines, thus enabling unified view of a travel, regardless of mode. The use of modern highperformance graph database allows construction of high-resolution accessibility maps for an entire metropolitan area with its 100-200 K buildings. The application is tested and applied in a case study involving the evaluation of the 2011 bus line reform in the city of Tel Aviv. Specifically, we demonstrate that while the reform increased the average accessibility for the entire city the increase was not uniform with different areas of the city experiencing different absolute accessibility by transit and relative accessibility in comparison to car travel. The bus reform did in fact benefit travelers that experienced low relative accessibility, but the benefits are mainly accruing to longer trips. Our approach and computational methods can be employed for directly investigating the impacts of transportation infrastructure investments. ARTICLE HISTORY

Sizing up transport poverty: A national scale accounting of low-income households suffering from inaccessibility in Canada, and what to do about it

“…Other studies have generated combined measures of socio-economic disadvantage at a neighbourhood level to compare with accessibility measures to highlight where gaps in transit accessibility align with social need (Foth et al, 2013;Fransen et al, 2015). Research has also shown that the travel modes available to an individual makes a substantial difference in terms of access to destinations, particularly the disparity between transit riders and those who have regular use of a private vehicle (Benenson et al, 2011;Golub & Martens, 2014;Benenson et al, 2017). There have been a number of academic reviews which have discussed how social equity, and in particular improving people's access to destinations, should be further incorporated into transportation plans and policy to reduce inequalities and foster social and economic inclusion (Wee & Geurs, 2011;Karner & Niemeier, 2013;Manaugh et al, 2015;Pereira et al, 2017).…”

Modelling Public Transport Accessibility with Monte Carlo Stochastic Simulations: A Case Study of Ostrava

“…As well as this, several options for the method of travel are available. Even though the majority of studies use only the fastest connection from the given departure time (e.g., [25]), this option is not preferred for all people and all purposes. Our model deals with a specified time interval and finds not just the fastest connection within this interval, but also the latest, the earliest, the shortest, a random and a "comfort" option.…”

“…Walking to and from stops is included as an obligatory part of each PT trip (similar to [25]). Furthermore, walking directly (hereafter referred to as pedestrian mode) between the origin and the destination is evaluated, which is important for shorter trips.…”

Multi-Mode Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) Method to Measure the Potential Spatial Accessibility of Healthcare Services

“…Besides, due to both data availability and computing limitations, most studies have used rather rough estimates of travel time when calculating potential accessibility [16]. The problem with such an approach is that it ignores traffic congestion, transfer time, necessary walking time, etc., which may substantially alter the travel time results [14,[17][18][19].…”