Abstract

Policymakers and planners assess the implementation of urban public transport (UPT) planning against objective measures such as load factor, average passengers per trip, capacity utilisation and total capacity. In some cases, however, improving these measures can bring an unforeseen reduction in the access UPT users have to opportunities. This study therefore sets out to assess potential accessibility (PA) as a measure of effectiveness at the decision stage of UPT planning. The work draws largely on field studies, surveys, data inventories and existing plans. Comprehensive UPT planning was carried out in the VISUM traffic simulation package with PA taken into account, and a four-stage UPT planning procedure is proposed. The results show that PA can serve as an alternative assessment tool at the decision stage where objective measures fail to represent the effectiveness of alternative scenarios adequately.