www.jrc.ec.europa.eu

Measuring rail accessibility using Open Data

Elena Navajas-Cawood

White Paper on Transport

Rail transport is a strategic sector and its importance is fully recognized by the European Commission: as stated in the White Paper on Transport (EC, 2011a), efforts are needed to increase the share of rail passenger transport over other modes.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a significant concept for evaluating spatial interactions and transport systems attractiveness.

Accessibility

Location-based

Person-based

Utility-based

Activity-based

Infrastructure-basedoften used in transport

planning

Service Based indicator

( )hij i ji z

hzjz

f t W WL

W

Accessibility: a time band analysis

Spatial dimension of the analysis

• Population with "ease of access" to stations at NUTS3 level: catchment areas defined by estimating different buffer zones defined over GISCO Population Grid (2011).

• Territorial units: NUTS 3 (2010 definition) and Larger Urban Zones (Dijkstra & Poelman, 2012)

Open Data in transport

• The Digital Agenda for Europe (part of the EU 2020 strategy) consider the innovative potential and use of Open Data.

• Unfortunately public transport timetable data are outside the scope of application of the 2003 Directive (2003/98/EC) on the re-use of public sector information (PSI) due to their "industrial or commercial character" as referred to in article 2(2).

Advantages of using real data

• More accurate travel times

• User profiles (trip purposes) by filtering by type of train

• Can be updated each year

• Information upgrade in our transport network model

• Travel and waiting times

• Costs

• The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information created in 2006 by Google

• Unlike urban public transport (mainly GTFS) rail transport open data is still waiting harmonization

GTFS Data

GTFS formatGTFS files are CSV text files representing route schedules of bus, tram, underground, train, ferries, etc.

Filename Required Defines

agency.txt Required One or more transit agencies that provide the data in this feed.

stops.txt Required Individual locations where vehicles pick up or drop off passengers.

routes.txt Required Transit routes. A route is a group of trips that are displayed to riders as a single service.

trips.txt Required Trips for each route. A trip is a sequence of two or more stops that occurs at specific time.

stop_times.txt Required Times that a vehicle arrives at and departs from individual stops for each trip.

calendar.txt Required Dates for service IDs using a weekly schedule. Specify when service starts and ends, as well

as days of the week where service is available.

calendar_dates.txt Optional Exceptions for the service IDs defined in the calendar.txt file. If calendar_dates.txt includes

ALL dates of service, this file may be specified instead of calendar.txt.

fare_attributes.txt Optional Fare information for a transit organization's routes.

fare_rules.txt Optional Rules for applying fare information for a transit organization's routes.

shapes.txt Optional Rules for drawing lines on a map to represent a transit organization's routes.

frequencies.txt Optional Headway (time between trips) for routes with variable frequency of service.

transfers.txt Optional Rules for making connections at transfer points between routes.

feed_info.txt Optional Additional information about the feed itself, including publisher, version, and expiration

information.

Methodology

• Constructing the transport network: create a point layer containing the rail stations and a polyline layer containing the direct connection between stations.

• Calculating the schedules: service schedules are calculated based on the scheduled departures associated with each route only for services with direct connections to the destination city of interest.

• Calculating the indicators: this step the stored spatial and temporal data are used to calculate the different indicators for assessing railroad accessibility.

21st May 2014 24h time frame

UK GTFS dataset

Results:

Level of service by station

Results:

Level of service by station

Results: Isochrones

IC services travel time from Amsterdam Centraal

travel timetravel time weighted with frequency

Results: Variability of accessibility

Results: Variability of accessibility

Conclusions

This study investigated two main aspects of the accessibility:

• transport component (travel time, cost of the O/D trip) based on real timetable,

• temporal component (time restriction/availability of service) based on service availability and calendar,

• spatial component based on catchment areas around station

Conclusions

Furthermore this insight provides also an analysis of the input

data acquisition.

• GTFS specifications present a clear framework

• Lack of common definitions across Europe on some

parameters of the GTFS.

Thank you for your attention

Elena NAVAJAS CAWOODEuropean Commission,Joint Research Centre (JRC), Institute for Prospective Technological Studies Economics of Climate Change, Energy & Transport Unit J.1

e-mail: elena.navajas-cawood@ec.europa.eu

Accessibility: an time band analysis

0( )( )1 a t t

Kf t

e

Accessibility: an time band analysis