A Configurational Accessibility Study of Road and Metro Network in Shanghai, China

Abstract

Between 1993 and 2013, the high-capacity metro network of Shanghai has expanded rapidly and played a major part in the sustainable public transportation system. In this short period, the major change in accessibility introduced by the metro system kept pace with massive increase in population and land use intensification and diversification of the urban form. Understanding the relationship between public transport networks, public transport access point accessibility, land use location as destination accessibility and urban form is becoming important for interpreting the relationship between urban land-use and the transportation system in Metropolitan areas. However, most previous empirical studies relied on qualitative descriptions using large geographic scale. Furthermore, few studies focused on the detailed analysis of public transport access point locations. The objective of this paper is to identify spatially disaggregated micro-macro relative accessibility relationships between urban block size, road and metro-line network design, metro stations and bus stop locations, commercial land use locations distribution and station usage in Shanghai. Using GIS and Spatial Design Network Analysis (sDNA) software to perform multi-level accessibility of each link in each network, we found that most of metro stations, bus stops and commercial land use are located on the part of the road network with the highest level of micro to macro accessibility indicating a coupling multiplier effect between metro stations, commercial land use and multi-level multi network spatial accessibility. These findings suggest the possibility of evaluating the effectiveness of land use planning in relation to micro-macro accessibility change due to transportation system change and thus the further potential for guiding transport oriented development planning and urban design place making.