Walk this way: Visualizing accessibility and mobility in metro station areas on a 3D pedestrian network

Abstract

Accessibility and mobility are positioned differently at the heart of transportation planning; whilst a transportation system with high accessibility will not necessarily be able to support high mobility. In this short article, we evaluate and visualize the accessibility and mobility of pedestrian networks around the metro station areas in a transit-oriented city – Hong Kong. By using the newly released 3D pedestrian network for the whole of Hong Kong under the Open and Big Data Plans, we have created visualizations to compare the 500-m walking coverage area and reachable area with a 10-min walking distance that reflects the accessibility and mobility around metro station areas, respectively. We find that there are significant differences between accessibility and mobility for some stations. We illustrate the potential underlying causes by comparing three representative pairs of stations as examples.