Analysis of public transport (in)accessibility and land-use pattern in different areas in Singapore

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel computational approach combining geometrical and information-theoretic analysis to assess public transport accessibility and land-use patterns in Singapore, revealing disparities across different regions.

Contribution

The paper presents a new method for analyzing transport accessibility and land-use clustering, providing detailed insights into spatial coverage and service quality variations.

Findings

Commercial areas have excellent accessibility.

Residential areas show good to very good accessibility.

Significant regional disparities in service quality exist.

Abstract

As more and more people continue to live in highly urbanised areas across the globe, reliable accessibility to amenities and services plays a vital role in sustainable development. One of the challenges in addressing this issue is the consistent and equal provision of public services, including transport for residents across the urban system. In this study, using a novel computational method combining geometrical analysis and information-theoretic measures, we analyse the accessibility to public transport in terms of the spatial coverage of the transport nodes (stops) and the quality of service at these nodes across different areas. Furthermore, using a network clustering procedure, we also characterise the land-use pattern of those areas and relate that to their public transport accessibility. Using Singapore as a case study, we find that the commercial areas in the CBD area expectedly have excellent accessibility and the residential areas also have good to very good accessibility. However, not every residential area is equally accessible. While the spatial coverage of stops in these areas is very good, the quality of service indicates substantial variation among different regions, with high contrast between the central and eastern areas compared to the others in the west and north of the city-state. We believe this kind of analysis could yield a good understanding of the current level of public transport services across the urban system, and their disparity will provide valuable and actionable insights into the future development plans.