Abstract

Analyzing Accessibility to Transit Stations Using Free and Commercial Geodata
Track: Transportation
Authors: Dennis Zielstra, Hartwig Hochmair

Transit service is only a realistic option for a pedestrian if the service is available at or near that person's location. Whereas there are a variety of measures for transit availability, such as service frequency, this presentation focuses on the spatial aspect of pedestrian accessibility to transit stations, that is, on service coverage. Since the service area for a station is defined over the maximum network walking distance from a transit station, a complete street network that includes pedestrian segments, i.e., shortcuts, is of high importance for a realistic assessment of service areas.
This presentation demonstrates the use of ArcGIS 9.3.1 and the Network Analyst extension on five US and four German cities and a variety of proprietary (e.g. TeleAtlas, NAVTEQ) and freely available (e.g. TIGER/Line, OpenStreetMap) street vector datasets to determine the service areas for a variety of transit stations (e.g. bus stops and metro and light-rail stations).