Similar to other metropolitan cities in China, urban rail transportation has been highly emphasized in Beijing in the past decades. However, the growing subway system is seriously challenged by several critical issues, one of which is that the ridership must be restricted at certain stations during peak hours due to crowded conditions. This suppresses the transport demand and pushes passengers to other modes of transport. Therefore, the characteristics of subway ridership should be carefully studied to increase the appeal of subways and maximize their potential. This paper categorizes Beijing subway ridership characteristics into seven different groups based on their temporal distributions and corresponding land use types by analyzing Beijing's subway smart card data. In addition, the heterogeneity among stop-level, line-level, and network-level ridership temporal distributions is analyzed. Temporal distribution characteristics should be incorporated into ridership prediction and subway network optimization, and can thereby improve subway demand forecasting, planning, and design.
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