Utilizing mobile phone-based floating population data to measure the spatial accessibility to public transit

Abstract

Spatial accessibility to public transit changes with population shifts during the day in association with time-varying transit supply levels. In this study, we propose a strategy for the utilization of mobile phone-based floating population data to measure the accessibility to public transit. We used the Huff model-based, floating catchment area method to measure the time-varying accessibility in Seoul, Korea, during rush-hours and late night hours. We compared the floating population-based access measures with the census data for these hours. Our results imply that utilization of the phone-based floating population data can provide reliable and fine-grained results in cases of evening rush hour and late night hours. Therefore, it can replace static census data typically used for the estimation of the accessibility index.