Interchange between Metro and Other Modes: Access Distance and Catchment Area

As a mass transit mode, the metro attracts passengers from a vast area around its stations through various feeding modes such as walking and cycling. This catchment area is important in interchange planning, transit integration and implementation, and demand forecasting, but the conventional airline buffer greatly overestimates the service area. Moreover, other access modes such as cycling and bus have seldom been considered. It is significant to delineate service areas for multiple modes using the network distance. To this end, an approach of determining the access distances and delineating the service coverage for metro stations was established for multiple feeding modes using a network approach. The proposed method was applied to the Beijing metro based on a large survey sample of trip origins. Data on more than four thousand metro trips were collected in a field survey, and the trip origins were retrieved and visualized in a geographic information system (GIS). Using the geocoded information of the metro, bus lines, and road networks of Beijing, the trip distances were calculated for the corresponding networks for all of the trips investigated. The shares of access modes and the distributions of access distances were analyzed. The service areas of all the metro stations were delineated for each mode and visualized in the downtown and suburban areas through a network analysis. The possible applications of the geocoded service areas drawn in this work, such as optimizing the location of the interchange facilities and boosting the cooperation of different transit modes, are discussed.