Geographical Information Systems-Based Bus Stop Accessibility and Safety Analysis-A Case Study of the Coimbatore Corporation

摘要

Road Transport is the backbone of Indian economy and Buses play an indispensable role in serving the transport requirements of any city in India. Bus stop location is the principal factor which influences the level of service of bus transport network and should be extremely accessible and accident-free. This paper proposes a three-step integrated method to optimize the location of existing bus stops for improving the level of accessibility and public safety by using collected accident data from police records using Spatial analysis tools of ArcGIS. The first step includes a weighted overlay analysis of kernel density estimation (KDE), Point density analysis (PDA) and Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) of existing bus stops to analyze its accessibility. The second step is to study the three years of Traffic Accidents (2013-2015) in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. The network KDE uses Traffic accident data and graphically displays the areas highly prone to accidents. The third step is to overlay the high accessibility and accident analysis maps to identify the highly vulnerable bus stops. This approach could help transportation authorities and security specialists to determine and prioritize bus stops that require more safety attention and areas without adequate bus stops.