Modeling public-transit connectivity with spatial quality-of-transfer measurements

Improving public-transit connectivity is one of the most vital tasks in transit-operations planning. A poor connection can cause some passengers to stop using the transit service. This work analyzes the performance of public-transit networks in terms of the attributes involved with coordination and connectivity. These attributes are primarily concerned with passenger transfers, and include ride, wait and walk times and type of transfers made, that is, with street-crossing, sidewalk, non-walk and one-leg trip. Based on these attributes, transit-connectivity measures are established as a tool to evaluate the pros and cons of each defined zone of transit lines from a connectivity perspective. The zone of transit lines can be associated with small or large transit networks from which two types of analyses can be made: (i) detecting the inefficiency of connectivity-related issues for the zone, and (ii) comparing the measures between different zones to arrive to the conclusion of which zone is more worthy of improvements. This will allow, for instance, the comparison between cities and between zones in the city. In this work a model is developed to integrate spatial and non-spatial data for the construction of a public-transit network spatial repository, which in turn, is used to classify transfers, and calculate the developed connectivity measures. A case study in Auckland, New Zealand, demonstrates the benefits of the model and connectivity measures. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.