The Skeletal Trap: Mapping Spatial Inequality and Ghost Stops in Ankara's Transit Network

TL;DR

This paper examines how Ankara's urban expansion and network design create spatial inequalities and ghost stops, revealing persistent center-periphery disparities through empirical analysis of transit data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Connectivity-Based Weighted Distribution Model to analyze spatial inequality and structural bottlenecks in Ankara's transit network.

Findings

Persistent center-periphery asymmetries identified

Structural bottlenecks in the transit network

Spatial accessibility inequalities revealed

Abstract

Ankara's public transport crisis is commonly framed as a shortage of buses or operational inefficiency. This study argues that the problem is fundamentally morphological and structural. The city's leapfrog urban expansion has produced fragmented peripheral clusters disconnected from a rigid, center-oriented bus network. As a result, demand remains intensely concentrated along the Kizilay-Ulus axis and western corridors, while peripheral districts experience either chronic under-service or enforced transfer dependency. The deficiency is therefore not merely quantitative but rooted in the misalignment between urban macroform and network architecture. The empirical analysis draws on a 173-day operational dataset derived from route-level passenger and trip reports published by EGO under the former "Transparent Ankara" initiative. To overcome the absence of stop-level geospatial data, a Connectivity-Based Weighted Distribution Model reallocates passenger volumes to 1 km x 1 km grid cells using network centrality. The findings reveal persistent center-periphery asymmetries, structural bottlenecks, and spatially embedded accessibility inequalities.