Evaluation of Transfer Space Efficiency of Metro Stations in Renovation Projects Using Virtual Wayfinding Tasks and User Satisfaction Surveys

Towards a collective opinion generation approach with multiple objectives for evaluating rail transit station accessibility in urban areas

The study of exploring the internal connection between rail transit and land use is of great significance for the coordinated development of urban space and rail transit construction, and it is also important for the intensive use of land affected by rail transit stations. The land use structure and population density surrounding the stations of Line 1.2.3 of Xi’an Rail Transit were clustered by SPSS for identifying the rail transit stations with high population density. Subsequently, We have established an indicator system of urban land use and rail transit operation capabilities based on multivariate data, and explored the coordinated relationship between rail transit and land use through data envelopment analysis (DEA) evaluation methods at high population density stations. Besides, the coupling degree of land use in rail transit stations with high population density was evaluated, and the key indicators affecting the coupling degree were further analyzed in Xi’an. In conclusion, this study finds that the relationship between rail transit capacity and land use of high population density rail transit stations is unbalanced. Hence, to promote the sustainable development of rail transit capacity and surrounding land, it is suggested that we should confine the development of land use intensity around the station, improve the service functions of small-scale living areas, and optimize the travel environment intended for short-distance travel. For residents, they are encouraged to choose the mode of rail transit for their long-distance travel. At the same time, the peak passenger flow at the stations should be evacuated accordingly.

Integration between bike sharing and rail transit provides users with a more flexible travel pattern in an effort to address the “first/last mile” problem. This study aims to examine the determinants influencing the ridership of station-based bike sharing (SBBS) and free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) at rail transit stations. The empirical analysis is based on user transaction records of two bike sharing systems in Nanjing, China. We first apply the k-means cluster method to classify rail transit stations into five types according to the temporal profiles of bike sharing usage for rail transit access. Later, ordinary least squares (OLS) and partial least squares (PLS) regression models are developed respectively by differentiating SBBS and FFBS. Compared with the OLS models, PLS models could address the issue of multi-collinearity and generally have better interpretation abilities. The PLS results reveal that the usage of SBBS for rail transit access shares similarities with FFBS. For example, both of them are positively influenced by population density and the number of restaurants. Meanwhile, different types of rail transit stations exhibit different impacts on the ridership of the two bike sharing systems. Our results show that there exists a substitution effect for rail transit access between two bike sharing systems, that is, SBBS may be more frequently used for commuting trips than FFBS. The findings of this study provide a better understanding of the impact of various factors on the SBBS and FFBS ridership at rail transit stations, thereby helping to promote the integration of rail transit and bike sharing systems.

With the fast development of urban rail transit in China, the comprehensive use and development of the land surrounding rail transit stations become an important development strategy for all big cities. How to select “nodes”, which represent those stations, with a significant development value in a rail transit network is the key component of comprehensive land use and development. In order to quantitatively assess the value of comprehensive land use and development for urban rail transit stations, this paper demonstrates a method to assess this value by evaluating the accessibility ofnodes in the rail transit network and conducts a case study of simulation analysis on the existing rail transit network in Chengdu by using ArcGIS. The results of the simulation show that the rail transit stations with more transfer routes have better accessibility and the land around these stations is of higher value for comprehensive utilization and development. In addition, this paper found that the accessibility of rail transit stations should be improved with more rail transit express lines to connect to stations, and rail transit loop lines have better accessibility of stations than non-loop lines.

In today’s environmentally conscious society, advocated by a global point of view, land and building use around rail transit stations have changed in the urbanization process. Promoting urban construction and development centered on rail transit stations not only meets the actual needs of urban sustainable development but is also an important means to guide the development of innovative cities. Therefore, it is meaningful to study the characteristics of urban spatial succession, development rules, and future trends based on this new perspective. We analyzed the relationship between rail transit networks and urban form in Japan using GIS by investigating changes in land and building use around rail transit stations over 30 years in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (from 1985–2010) using factor analysis and cluster analysis, and we discussed the impact of land consolidation planning and the setting and site selection of new stations based on urban development to understand the development trends inside and outside station zones and urban spatial succession. The results showed the following: (1) There are certain relationships between the development of urban form and traffic demand, and the rail transit network in Japan has the characteristics of high accessibility and aggregation of a small network; (2) Commercial development with a high plot ratio is dispersed and diverted by high-density rail transit stations in the commercial center of Japan; and (3) Commercial sub-centers form complexes by integrating multi-line transfers and form regional linkages through clustered commercial development. Regional business centers realize the agglomeration and radiation of functions through the compound development of station zones. This case study on rail transit zones and urban spatial succession in Japan has important enlightenment significance for urban construction toward optimizing the location and development of suburban rail transit lines, promoting the compact development of cities, exploring new ways to build more reasonable transport, planning city design and layout for rail transit station zones, and providing decision-making references for urban regeneration and sustainable development.

Railway has emerged as a fast, convenient, safe, clean, and low-cost alternative to air and road transportation. Many countries have invested in rail transportation. In America, Europe and Asia, large investments are planned for rail transportation. This is because congestion problems can be reduced with the introduction of rail transportation. Rail transportation involves several components which are important to ensure the smooth and safe delivery of services such as locomotives, rail stations and railway tracks. Rail transit stations are places where trains stop to pick-up and drop-off passengers. Stations are vital for many to enable them to engage in work and social commitments. This paper focuses only on the rail transit station as it is one of the important components in rail transportation. It is also considered as a key public meeting place and space for interactions in a community. The role of rail transit station and the requirements of a good rail transit station are also described in this paper. Steps in selecting the location of rail transit station include the function and facilities in rail transit station are discussed with reference to best practices and handbooks. Selection of the appropriate rail transit station locations may help users indirectly. In addition, this paper will also elucidate on the design considerations for an efficient and effective rail transit station. Design selections for the rail transit station must be balanced between aesthetic value and functional efficiency. The right design selection may help conserve energy, assure and facilitate consumers even thought a rail transit station plays a smaller role in attracting consumers compared to a shopping complex or a residential building. This will contribute towards better and greener building for a green transportation facility. Thus, with this paper it is expected to assist the relevant authority to identify important elements in the selection and determination of suitable rail transit station design for the future. It is also important to ensure the design is appropriate from the selection and suitability perspective as design and operation will assist to facilitate the success of the national rail network and encourage the public to use rail transit system. A conducive and neatly design railway station will not only add to the passenger experience but also, as a supporting facility to the economic, social and environmental benefits of the rail industry.

This paper explores the relationship of walk access distance to rapid rail transit (RRT) stations with personal characteristics and station context, specifically in regard to an operated RRT system in the city of Nanjing, China. Both descriptive analysis and regression analysis on the commuter survey are conducted to reveal the association. Descriptive analysis indicates that the walk access distance in the morning peak is longer than that in the afternoon peak. Young commuters walk farther to access to RRT stations than children and older people. The walk access distance decreases with increasing household income. Regression analysis, in particular, on the association between walk access distance and station context suggests that commuters walk farther to reach a terminal station but walk a shorter distance to arrive at a transfer station than to a typical station. The walk access distance to an elevated station is longer than that to an underground station, and an approximately 100-m distance premium does seem to exist. In addition, the radius of the pedestrian catchment area (PCA) of an underground RRT station is about 200–300 m longer than the PCA of bus rapid transit station. Implications of the present study include defining flexible rail transit station's PCAs in estimating urban rail transit (URT) ridership at the station level, optimizing the house location and price premium analysis around URT stations, and identifying the opportunities for transit-oriented development in the PCA of rail stations.

Qualified with benefits in the aspects of environment, economy, and society, urban rail transit presents a rapid development in China during recent decades. Increasing initiatives and practices with views to facilitate people's lives and intensively utilize land resources have been engaged. Accordingly, urban rail transit stations with multi-layer structure integrated in three-dimensional space have been designed and built in many cities. Due to the complexity of the rail transit stations, there is a need to identify those high-risk nodes in the stations and develop relevant risk management strategies. Therefore, this paper introduces a new approach to identify high-risk nodes in the urban rail transit stations through field investigation and complex network analysis. The Chongqing Lianglukou rail transit station was selected for case study. With the determined high-risk nodes, rail transit management firms can develop relevant risk mitigation measures for those high-risk nodes, re-allocate their resources to create a safe and secure environment for passengers in urban rail transit stations.

COVID-19 spreads rapidly among people, so that more and more people are wearing masks in rail transit stations. However, the current face detection algorithms cannot distinguish between a face wearing a mask and a face not wearing a mask. This paper proposes a face detection algorithm based on single shot detector and active learning in rail transit surveillance, effectively detecting faces and faces wearing masks. Firstly, we propose a real-time face detection algorithm based on single shot detector, which improves the accuracy by optimizing backbone network, feature pyramid network, spatial attention module, and loss function. Subsequently, this paper proposes a semi-supervised active learning method to select valuable samples from video surveillance of rail transit to retrain the face detection algorithm, which improves the generalization of the algorithm in rail transit and reduces the time to label samples. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant performance over the state-of-the-art algorithms on rail transit dataset. The proposed algorithm has a wide range of applications in rail transit stations, including passenger flow statistics, epidemiological analysis, and reminders of passenger who do not wear masks. Simultaneously, our algorithm does not collect and store face information of passengers, which effectively protects the privacy of passengers.

With increasingly growth of national economy, rail transit constructions in China are in full swing, which bring about rapid development of underground space in urban areas and further improvement of function and space of the area around rail transit stations. Based on the analysis of different space types of underground streets around rail-transit junctions, this paper discusses some concepts of connected space in rail transit stations from the perspective of rail transit junctions, analyses the details of function, space, business format and environment of two typical cases, and summarizes the key points of promoting green efficiency of connected underground streets at metro stations, so as to provide references for design and construction of similar cases.

In this paper, the factors influencing the passenger flow of rail transit stations in Shanghai of China are studied by using the entropy weight-grey correlation model. The model assumptions and the corresponding variables are proposed, including traffic accessibility, built environment, regional characteristics of the district to which the rail transit station belongs, conditions of the station and spatial location, which affect the passenger flow of rail transit stations. Based on the assumptions and the variables, the entropy weight-grey correlation model for analyzing the passenger flow of urban rail transit stations is presented. By collecting the data of passenger flow of rail transit stations and corresponding influencing factors in Shanghai, the results of the entropy weight-grey correlation model are obtained. It is shown that the influencing factors, such as the distances from the rail transit station to the adjacent third-class hospital and the adjacent large commercial plazas, district committees, parking areas and the transaction price of important plots, and the gross output value of the tertiary industry, have significant impacts on the passenger flow of a subway station. Finally, some suggestions are proposed for the local governments to formulate improved policies for rail transit development. The conclusions can provide a reference for the development of rail transit in other large cities and countries.

Previous attempts to obtain the qualitative interpretation that rail transit affects the land use and urban space structure are lack of effective quantitative evaluation model. In this paper the evolvement mechanism of land use and urban space structure along rail transit can be proposed to objectively reflect the relationship and the complexity between rail transit and land use structure. Firstly, the land development intensity in suburb when rail transit opened in Beijing can be obtained. Then, the information entropy model can be used to evaluate the land use structure along the rail transit in three development stages that is 2003, 2007 and 2010 respectively. Finally, the land use structure along different type of rail transit station can be proposed. It shows that the passing by rail transit plays a significant role in space structure of suburb. Meanwhile, the residential, financial and official land development may be attracted along rail transit and industrial land repelled according to their information entropies. Especially the financial and official land development is closer from rail transit station, its intensity is higher and the scope of attraction is expanding.

Urban rail transit is an essential part of the urban public transportation system. The reasonable spatial data visualization of urban rail transit stations can provide a more intuitive way for the majority of travelers to arrange travel plans and find destinations. The map service of rail transit stations generated by data visualization has gradually become indispensable information guidance in the rail transit system. The existing map service icons block each other when the scale changes, and new stations cannot be displayed dynamically when users drag the map. This paper uses filtering and sorting methods to dynamically query and visualize the relatively more important transportation stations within the users’ visible range, so as to solve the above problems and provide people with better transportation services. Our method introduces three constraints: spatial diversity, time-sharing passenger flow analysis and whether it is a transit station, and calculates the scores of constraint relationships of feature objects to evaluate stations. On the basis of the skyline query, the scores of feature objects are combined and sorted to obtain an ordered object set of the most interesting k points(top-k POIs), and the rail transit stations are dynamically retrieved and visualized. Before sorting POIs, we filter out POIs that need to be fitted, so that only the k most representative POIs in the currently visible range are displayed. When the map scale changes, the displayed POIs are updated. Finally, through the statistics of efficiency calculation of this method under different scales and centers, combined with users’ evaluations, it was proved that our method could better display critical information and improve user experience.

Previous studies generally used land use and travel flow to investigate the efficiency of the railway system in Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) cities. Furthermore, to study the association of land use and jobs–housing distribution of commuters, we can find out the potential development of rail commuting. In this research, four railway lines in Wuhan, China, were selected to explore the land use in promoting practical commuting population according to the smart-card data obtained. For land use issues, except the road density and building density, a Normalized Location-Weighted Landscape Index (NLWLI) based on the source – sink theory in landscape ecology was established to assess the jobs–housing land use around rail transit stations. Meanwhile, employment and housing details of commuters around rail transit stations were identified using smart-card data. We found that the generation of commuting flow was affected by building density and the land use of employment in the immediate vicinity of rail transit stations. The distribution of building density and commuters in a mature rail line was roughly a normal distribution. However, due to the inconsistency of land use and jobs – housing distribution around stations, the requirement of the balance of land use and jobs – housing distribution should be reduced at the scale of rail stations in the TOD planning systems. This study is the application of massive smart-card data in the field of urban research. It identifies land use issues that affect rail transit commuting flow, and can help urban planners improve the efficiency of rail transit through planning and design.

The discordance between the operation of rail transit and surrounding land use is highlighted with the rapid construction of rail transit in China. The related research on coupling relationship is well needed. Taking 13 typical commercial service rail transit stations in Xi'an as the example, this article established the evaluation indicator of coordinated relationship between rail transit station operating efficiency and land use, and a data envelopment analysis (DEA)model was used to evaluate the coupling degree between them. According to the research results, the coupling development between operating efficiency and land use in Xi'an commercial service rail transit station is at a low level and there exists a huge difference between the two. Moreover, this research identified the key indexes that influence the coupling development of the two, namely Class-A, Class-B, and Class-R land use proportion, plot ratio, land use mixture and parking facility control, and determined the reasonable control range of these four indices. The research promotes the intensive use of land around Xi'an rail transit station and better supports the sustainable operation of rail transit.