Opportunity-based Dynamic Transit Accessibility in Southern California: Measurement, Findings, and a Comparison with Automobile Accessibility

摘要

Accessibility by public transportation is an important ingredient for specification of activityparticipation and travel behavior models, assessment of level of service by publictransportation, equity analysis, and the design of public transportation provision. Althoughtransit ridership is relatively low in the United States when compared to other countries,transit serves a segment of the population that may benefit substantially from its provision.The relative attractiveness of public transportation depends critically on its performance interms of the accessibility it provides to link population to employment and activityopportunities. In practice, there is a lack of an effective means to derive such indicators andrelated performance measures. In this paper, we present an opportunity-based transitaccessibility measure applied to the Southern California Association of Governments mega17region. The indicators computed are sensitive to availability of opportunities for travelerswithin a day (e.g., due to opening and closing times of businesses) and a direct function ofthe transit routes and schedules and related spatio-temporal level of service variation during aday. In the paper we describe the method, provide examples on transit accessibility and thencompare it to the automobile accessibility.