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Comparable Measures of Accessibility to Public Transport Using the General Transit Feed Specification

2016; Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3390/su8030224

2071-1050

Jinjoo Bok, Young-Sang Kwon,

Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis

Public transport plays a critical role in the sustainability of urban settings. The mass mobility and quality of urban lives can be improved by establishing public transport networks that are accessible to pedestrians within a reasonable walking distance. Accessibility to public transport is characterized by the ease with which inhabitants can reach means of transportation such as buses or metros. By measuring the degree of accessibility to public transport networks using a common data format, a comparative study can be conducted between different cities or metropolitan areas with different public transit systems. The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) by Google Developers allows this by offering a common format based on text files and sharing the data set voluntarily produced and contributed by the public transit agencies of many participating cities around the world. This paper suggests a method to assess and compare public transit accessibility in different urban areas using the GTFS feed and demographic data. To demonstrate the value of the new method, six examples of metropolitan areas and their public transit accessibility are presented and compared.