Using Accessibility Measures in Urban Bus Network Improvement: A Case Study of Southampton, UK

The concept of accessibility has been widely adopted in the transportation planning field, but available research mainly focuses on using accessibility as an indicator for evaluating the overall transportation system performance. Limited studies on implementing accessibility in the decision-making process of transportation planning have been found in the literature, due to the shortage of appropriate mathematical methods for addressing accessibility and its measurement. Using Southampton as a case study, this research develops a practical accessibility model to evaluate the network performance for real-world size public transport networks, and to output more realistic results based on the available public-source input data. The methodology described has been shown to work well for the Southampton case study. While the methodology described here focuses on the UK context it potentially could be applied equally well in other contexts around the world.