Network Accessibility Study for Public Transport Coverage In the Harare Metropolitan Area : SATC 2021
Network Accessibility Study to Evaluate the Extent Of Public Transport Coverage In the Harare Metropolitan Area: SATC 2021
I presented at the Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2021) a paper on a study conducted to evaluate public transport accessibility in the Harare Metropolitan Area.
Accessibility refers to people’s ability to reach desired services and activities. This is the ultimate goal of most transport activities. Several factors affect accessibility. These include mobility, the quality and affordability of transport options, transport system connectivity, and land-use patterns.
Conventional planning tends to overlook and undervalue some of these factors and perspectives. A more comprehensive analysis of accessibility in planning expands the scope of potential solutions to transport problems. Accessibility-based planning provides planners with the possibility to understand interdependencies between transport and land use development.
This paper was awarded Best Practical Paper much to my delight and presented a case for using accessibility-based planning for urban transport improvement interventions in high-growth cities.
The full paper can be accessed here.
ABSTRACT
Understanding the extent of informal public transport networks is especially important for cities that rely on these modes to access facilities and amenities which enable them to fulfil their needs. The advent of mobile technology and the proliferation of location-based services enable basic computational capabilities to be implemented to analyse such types of networks. This study presents an accessibility modelling approach to examine the response of public transport services to changes in land use. Location-based point-of-interest data is used to develop adaptive accessibility metrics. An integrated pedestrian and transit network is modelled to evaluate the accessibility metrics to points-of-interest on the network spatially and temporally. This approach is demonstrated for the Harare metropolitan area to evaluate the performance of the partially regularised public transport service and its response to changes in land use. Understanding public transport network performance particularly in emerging cities is useful for the development of strategies that can potentially help fulfil the mobility needs of city inhabitants.
Below is a 15min presentation of the key insights and outcomes from the paper.