Unravelling hyperlocal public transport connectivity from strategic assignment models

Abstract

Public transport (PT) complements walking and cycling to help cities reaching for sustainability. However, strategic PT models often lack the spatial granularity to reveal the local-level connectivity to support proximity-based planning. This study proposes a method that enhances the strategic model travel times by attaching them to a hyperlocal spatial unit using the street network and network analysis. With London as the case study, we have refined the granularity of the travel time results between 4,400 modelling zones to between 160,000 hyperlocal spatial units. We then applied the detailed travel times to reveal the hyperlocal connectivity from each spatial unit to measure the access to schools and time taken to reach a fixed number of schools. This framework can be flexibly adapted for strategic models of other cities and to test the future transport and urban scenarios.