Spatio-temporal evaluation of transport accessibility of the Istanbul metrobus line

Abstract

High budget transport infrastructure projects in the Istanbul Metropolitan Area endeavour to increase the efficiency of the transportation system. Among those investments; the bus rapid transit system – Istanbul Metrobus Line (IML) – is the most popular one that serves one million trips per day. Yet, the performance and impact of IML are not quantitatively assessed. Hence in this study, a high-resolution GIS-remote sensing framework is designed to analyse before and after accessibility over the period of 40 years (namely 1987–1997–2007–2014). High resolution satellite images were processed to generate the lacking historical land cover/use information with the expected high accuracy. Within the study area, utilized accessibility indices have unevenly increased after the operation of IML, such as 104.19% in potential and 99.07% in daily accessibility. According to the achieved results, such high spatio-temporal spatial framework could aid decision makers to quantitatively assess and evaluate the performance of such investments.

Keywords:

• Accessibility
• urban road network
• spatial index
• geographical information system
• bus rapid transit system

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÛB?TAK), Grant No: CAYDAG-115Y692 and the ITU-BAP (Istanbul Technical University Scientific Research Project Coordination Unit), Grant No: MDK-2018-41462.