Speaker
Description
Public transportation accessibility in modern cities significantly influences individual mobility efficiency and is a crucial factor in enhancing urban competitiveness and ensuring balanced regional development. However, disparities in accessibility persist across different areas, limiting mobility in regions with underdeveloped public transportation networks. This, in turn, restricts access to employment opportunities and educational services, exacerbating regional development inequalities and disparities in quality of life. Public transportation accessibility is particularly important as it offers a more cost-effective alternative to private vehicles and provides equitable mobility services across diverse social groups. Furthermore, it plays a vital role in shaping long-term urban development strategies.
To improve public transportation accessibility, an accurate assessment of the current level is essential. However, existing studies have primarily conducted analyses based on administrative boundaries, which include areas without residents or transit stops, thereby limiting the precision of accessibility evaluations. Additionally, most studies focus on specific metropolitan areas, making it difficult to compare accessibility levels across different regions within a country. Moreover, previous research often evaluates accessibility based on a single mode of transportation, lacking a comprehensive multimodal analysis.
To address these limitations, this study proposes a "travel time-based reachable area analysis" approach by integrating transit stops and actual residential areas within a 500m × 500m grid-based network in South Korea. This method visualizes the areas that users can realistically reach within a given time frame. Furthermore, the analysis is extended beyond grid units to administrative districts ("dong") and incorporates data from all public transportation modes, including multimodal transfers. The study employs the following methodology:
First, establishing a 500m × 500m grid-based public transportation service area based on actual residential spaces rather than administrative boundaries.
Second, collecting and analyzing operational data from various transportation modes, including buses, trains, subways, aviation, and maritime transport, to assess interconnectivity, distances, and travel times.
Third, allocating public transportation stops to grid cells and identifying the range of reachable grids within a given time frame.
Last, comparing public transportation service coverage with regional population distributions to identify areas with insufficient transit services.
The analysis results indicate that the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA) possesses a more extensive transportation network than other regions. However, when considering service levels relative to population size, SMA exhibits relatively lower public transportation service availability. In contrast, regional cities demonstrate more localized mobility patterns centered around metropolitan hubs, with a narrower service range compared to SMA. Notably, certain areas exhibit disparities in public transportation accessibility relative to population density, highlighting regional imbalances.
The grid-based public transportation accessibility assessment proposed in this study enables a more realistic evaluation of mobility by focusing on actual residential areas. By analyzing reachable areas within the same travel time and incorporating population distribution, this approach facilitates the design of demand-responsive transportation services. Consequently, the findings of this study are expected to contribute to mitigating regional disparities in public transportation accessibility.
References
Shi, Fei. (2021) Research on Accessibility and Equity of Urban Transport Based on Multisource Big Data, Journal of Advanced Transportation, 2021, 1103331, 18 pages, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/1103331
ITF. (2023) Accessibility in the Seoul Metropolitan Area: Does Transport Serve All Equally?, International Transport Forum Policy Papers 117, OECD Publishing.
Logan, T., Williams, T., Nisbet, A., Liberman, K., Zuo, C., & Guikema, S. (2019) Evaluating urban accessibility: leveraging open-source data and analytics to overcome existing limitations, Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 46(5), 897-913. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808317736528
Han, D. H. (2016). The analysis of public transport accessibility and equity in Seoul, Doctoral dissertation, Konkuk University Graduate School.
Proffitt, D. G., Bartholomew, K., Ewing, R., & Miller, H. J. (2019). Accessibility planning in American metropolitan areas: Are we there yet? Urban Studies, 56(1), 167-192. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017710122
| Keywords | Spatial inequality; Public transportation accessibility; Disparity; Spatial coverage |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
