Multicriterial analysis of the accessibility of public transport stops in Cracow

Abstract

This study deals with the synthesis of selected attributes of public transport accessibility. The aim is to present a new method of multi-criteria analysis. As the research area, the city of Cracow has been chosen. The GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) system has been used to obtain traffic data for buses and trams within the city‘s transport company (MPK Krakow). The analysis itself consists of 4 main accessibility indicators (walking time to each stop, number of lines, directions, and connections from each stop). The problem of exceeding the stops accessibility beyond the administrative border of Cracow has been solved by using a 500 m wide buffer zone around the city. To connect the individual layers of indicators into a multicriteria analysis, the Voronoi diagram function has been applied. The results of the method are presented in the form of synthetic maps of transport accessibility for each bus and tram stop in Cracow. Together with the synthetic accessibility maps, an index of a stop importance has been created as well, which consists of the sum of the mean percentages from 3 indicators (number of lines, directions, connections). The synthetic method used and acquired detailed values not only for the city of Cracow as a whole, but also its individual parts make it possible to provide a comprehensive picture of accessibility by public transport. This multicriteria analysis can also be extended for a comparative study of selected cities.