Applying Geographic Information System Methodologies to Estimate the Catchment Area Accessibility of Park-and-Ride Facilities

Abstract

Park and Ride (P&R) systems play a potentially important role in transportation planning to decrease the undesirable effects of private cars in the Central Business District (CBD). In order to achieve this objective, an essential component to be investigated is the catchment areas of these P&R facilities. However, a limited number of studies have applied the Geographic Information System (GIS) to study the spatial boundary accessibility of the catchment areas of P&R. This study aims to analyze the spatial boundary accessibility of the catchment areas of P&R facilities using three GIS methods. The first method uses geometric shapes to analyze the catchment areas of P&R facilities according to regular shapes, such as parabolas or circles. The market area is the second method used to analyze travel time via the tool ArcGIS Network Analyst to determine the catchment area of P&Rs. Finally, the dynamic accessibility method determines how accessible a facility can be through a study of the spatial boundary accessibility of P&Rs based on the travel time and distance between zones and P&R. The result shows that the static methods identify the spatial boundary accessibility through the calculation of the size of the shape of each P&R separately, while the dynamic method identifies the level of accessibility in detail for all P&R and also the accessibility of each zone to reach a facility. In conclusion, the dynamic accessibility method presents better accuracy than static methods in order to estimate the spatial boundary accessibility of the catchment area of P&Rs.