Study on Accessibility of Feeder Lines with Different Geometric Shapes

The performance of the urban rail transit system depends largely on the operation efficiency of its feeder system. An improved way is proposed in this paper to calculate the accessibility index which is used for evaluation of feeder lines, and both passengers’ waiting time and the competition between different access modes are considered. Different from previous research, this paper focuses on whether and how the geometric shape differences affect the performance of fixed-route feeder lines. The impacts of line shape on accessibility are analysed by derived formulas for calculating accessibility under ideal conditions. The finding emerging from this study is that the accessibility of feeder lines differs obviously due to their shapes, given the same conditions of total line length, stop spacing, and vehicle fleet size. The service area of feeder lines with branches or a loop is closer to the rail station compared with that of linear lines, thus leading to fewer passengers served but shorter average travel time under specific routing plans. For further exploring the universality of the above finding, route alignment optimization models to maximize accessibility are built for different shaped lines. The optimal solutions of different shapes are obtained and compared in the cases of random generation to analyse the impacts of shapes on accessibility under different line length conditions