Measuring the Accessibility of Railway Stations in the Brussels Regional Express Network: a Node-Place Modeling Approach

As a result of mounting concerns over the adverse ecological and socio-economic effects of mobility systems dominated by individual motorized transport, metropolitan areas worldwide have expressed a renewed interest in the role of public transport. Like many other metropolitan areas, the Brussels Capital Region (BCR) faces the problem of an increasingly congested transport system. Against this backdrop, the Regional Express Railway (RER) network is intended as a rapid-transit railway system serving an area of 30 km around the region, with the objective of improving the capacity and frequency of the railway services between the BCR and its periphery. In order to inform policy prescription, this paper reports on a systematic empirical assessment of all RER railway stations in terms of transport and land use characteristics, by drawing on the node-place modeling and transit oriented development literature. The proposed accessibility instrument considers different catchment area sizes in order to increase its empirical basis. Based on this systematic railway station inventory, cluster analysis was conducted revealing seven comparative accessibility profiles, of which some prove highly robust over the different precinct sizes. When combining the quantitative analyses reported in this paper with the more intuitive expertise of practitioners and stakeholders involved in the planning process, the accessibility instrument may effectively assist the identification of differentiated development opportunities for the RER stations.