Network accessibility study to evaluate the extent of public transport coverage in the harare metropolitan area

Abstract

Understanding the extent of informal public transport networks is especially important for cities that rely on these modes to access facilities and amenities which enable them to fulfil their needs. The advent of mobile technology, and proliferation of location-based services enables basic computational capabilities to be implemented to analyse such type of networks. This study presents an accessibility modelling approach to examine the response of public transport services to changes in land use. Location based point-of-interest data is used to develop adaptive accessibility metrics. An integrated pedestrian and transit network are modelled to evaluate the accessibility metrics to points-of-interest on the network spatially and temporally. This approach is demonstrated for the Harare metropolitan area to evaluate the performance of the partially regularised public transport service and its response to changes in land use. Understanding public transport network performance particularly in emerging cities is useful for the development of strategies that can potentially help fulfil the mobility needs of city inhabitants.