An Aggregated Public Transit Accessibility Measure

Measuring the ease of access to the transit services is important in evaluating existing services, predicting travel demands, allocating transportation investments and making decisions on land use development. A new aggregated approach to assessing the accessibility of public transport is described to assist transit professionals in the planning and decision making process. It involves the use of readily available methods and represents a more holistic measure of transit accessibili-ty integrating developer, planner and operator perspectives. The paper reviews previous and cur-rent methods of measuring accessibility and selects three methods for application in a case study in Meriden, CT. Inconsistencies are noted across the methods, and a consistent grading scale is presented to standardize scores and ensure a better comparison of results. Finally, this paper pro-poses weighting factors for individual methods to formulate an aggregated measure based on in-dividual accessibility component measures. The approach aims to provide a robust and uniformly applicable measure of transit accessibility that can easily be interpreted by transit planners to identify shortcomings in service coverage and promote equity in transit accessibility in the com-munity.