Abstract
Public safety presents high importance in urban sustainable development. Transportation safety is a significant section in public safety. Over the last couple of decades, as a sustainable means of public transportation, urban rail transit presents a rapid development in China. Increasing initiatives and practices have been engaged with views to facilitating people’s travel and intensive utilizing land resources. Echoing this, rail transit stations with multi-floor structure have been built and show structure complexity. Due to this complexity, there is a need to focus on risk management for the stations to guarantee operation safety. Accordingly, this research introduces an innovative approach to identify high-risk nodes in the complex rail transit stations. The high-risk nodes are determined according to two aspects, which are the key nodes of the station and presenting large passenger volumes. Complex network analysis and field investigation were adopted in this study. The Lianglukou rail transit station in Chongqing, China was selected for case study. The research results in this study indicate that (1) in platform floors, stairs/escalators are almost high-risk nodes; (2) columns and metal fences that have been determined as high-risk nodes are located near stairs/escalators; (3) in concourse floor, the determined high-risk nodes present relative high degree centrality and low betweenness centrality compared with nodes in platform floor. The obtained high-risk nodes are helpful for the management firms to develop risk mitigation measures and re-allocate their resources to create a safe environment for passengers in the stations. The guarantee for the rail transit station operation safety plays an important role in enhancing urban sustainability.
Highlights
Public safety is necessary in achieving sustainable development, which has been considered to be an significant indicator in urban sustainability evaluation [1,2]
The high-risk node determination was based on the results of key nodes identification and passenger volume statistics, which means that the high-risk nodes were the nodes with strong connection and interaction abilities, and presents features of large passenger volumes, simultaneously
Many complex rail transit stations” (CRTSs) are always aggregated with crowded passengers in daily operation, especially the transfer stations in the occupation of multi rail transit lines
Summary
Public safety is necessary in achieving sustainable development, which has been considered to be an significant indicator in urban sustainability evaluation [1,2]. In China, the urban rail transit developed in a high speed and became a main component of urban public transport [12]. Aiming at facilitating people’s lives and intensively utilizing land resources, many newly built rail transit stations in China demonstrate obvious features of multi-floor structure integration in three-dimensional space and crowded people on each floor. The stations are titled as “complex rail transit stations” (CRTSs). The CRTSs are subject to various kinds of potential risks during operation due to their complex structures, crowding of people, and their openness [12,14]. The potential risk events include fire, explosion, and terrorist attacks, etc. The secure and stable operation of the CRTSs presents high significance in urban sustainable development. It is meaningful to study the high-risk nodes of CRTSs, which could be referred to in the management
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