Proposal of an activity-based elderly mobility index focusing on public transportation convenience

An application to housing analysis in slope area of Nagasaki City

Abstract

This study proposes a new index of elderly mobility that is based on their daily activity patterns, in order to explicitly consider the convenience of public transportation． Although shortest path based accessibility indexes have been often used to measure the living environment, they are trip-based and thus not able to assess levels-of-service of public transportation． Our activity-based mobility indexes, namely the number of “available paths” and “loss time”, explicitly consider the timetable of public transport service．They can assess the inconvenience due to the low frequency or biased scheduling of public transport for elderly people to perform daily activities． As a case study, we calculate these activity-based mobility index together with the conventional measures for slope areas in the Nagasaki City and analyzed the relationship between the measures and area situations．The results show that the proposed index explains the patterns of house increase/decrease, which conventional indexes could not sufficiently explain.