A novel route-based accessibility measure and its association with transit ridership

João Lucas Albuquerque-Oliveira, Francisco Moraes Oliveira-Neto and Rafael Pereira

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2024, vol. 179, issue C

Abstract: Transit systems play a key role in improving access to job opportunities and basic services such as health and education. Most studies in the literature calculate transit accessibility using traditional place-based indicators that measure accessibility at a given location. However, because transit routes are the main unit of analysis in most approaches for planning and operation of transit systems, these accessibility indicators provide limited information to inform transport planning at the route-level. In addition, previous studies have demonstrated the methodological limitations of traditional place-based accessibility metrics to study the association between accessibility and transit ridership. In this paper, we propose a novel route-based accessibility measure to fill the mentioned gaps. The indicator measures the average level of access to opportunities provided by a given transit route to the population in its extended catchment area. This indicator is flexible enough that it can be calculated using different travel cost functions and can be applied to measure access to different activity types for the whole population or for specific groups. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed indicator, we calculated the employment accessibility provided by all routes of the transit system of Fortaleza, Brazil. We also show that the proposed indicator has greater predictive power of transit ridership than other route-level accessibility measures found in the literature. This paper provides a methodological contribution that could help transport planners incorporate accessibility analysis into transit system redesign projects, and help practitioners anticipate what accessibility impacts and subsequent changes in transit ridership could be expected from route-level service changes, and to examine the influence of accessibility on transit ridership.

Keywords: Transit accessibility; Route-level; Transit ridership; Determinants of ridership; Directed acyclic graph; Transit network planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856423003361
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transa:v:179:y:2024:i:c:s0965856423003361

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2023.103916

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice is currently edited by John (J.M.) Rose

More articles in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().