EVALUATING ACCESS TO BUS STOPS CONSIDERING TOPOGRAPHICAL FEATURES: A CASE STUDY OF KANAZAWA WARD, YOKOHAMA CITY

Abstract

 In the hilly residential areas which have been developed since 1960s in the suburbs of Tokyo metropolitan area, not a few residents have come to find it difficult to get around due to the population aging, which requests to improve the convenience of public transportation. This study evaluated the accessibility to bus stops in Kanazawa Ward, Yokohama City, employing the concept of metabolic conversion distance to take into account the effects of the topography and the walking speed of elderly people. As a result, it showed that the metabolic conversion distance to the nearest bus stop was on average about 1.62 times longer than the network distance, and the standard deviation of it increased about 1.66 times. It also showed that approximately 57% of the residents in the 300m catchment area of bus stops by crow-fly distance were outside the catchment area by metabolic conversion distance. This implies that the common practices to evaluate accessibility based on crow-fly distance greatly underestimates the population in inconvenient areas. Moreover, based on these results, the direction of Yokohama City's public transportation policy was discussed.