Evaluation of Bus Accessibility Based on Hotspot Detection and Matter-Element Analysis

The paper aims to assess bus accessibility considering the matching between supply and demand for effectively optimizing the level and fairness of urban public transport service, which realizes the quantification of regional balance and accurate positioning the area with the worst balance. We firstly employ hotspot detection procedure based on taxi trajectory data and kernel density analysis to identify the travel sensitive areas, the heat values of which are deployed to represent travel demand spatial-temporally and evaluate weight factors for bus accessibility modeling. Matter-element theory is selected to establish multi-parameter evaluation model of bus accessibility, which has potential for solving incompatibility problems by systematically considering all factors. The correlations between accessibility indexes and heat value are deployed to evaluate weight factors rather than analytic hierarchy process or expert assessment method to improve subjectivity and dynamic updating. An index called the Level Ratio of Accessibility to Demand (LRAD) is addressed finally to quantify the balance between accessibility supply and travel demand of travel sensitive areas, which identifies the regional imbalance to assist the public transport system assignment. Xi'an, a large city, is selected as a case study for methodology verification. Bus accessibility degree of the whole city as well as its travel sensitive areas is evaluated by the matter-element model. It is found the bus transport accessibility of Xi'an is moderate level(M
₃
). The LRAD results identify the priority-processing area with the poor balance between accessibility supply and travel demand, which is cross referenced with local urban plans for verification.