AbstractsTransportation

Focusing on passenger transport, accessibility indicates the opportunities transport and land-use systems enable individuals to reach various activities. As a concept used in a number of scientific fields such as transport and urban planning, accessibility plays an important role in policy making. Widely used scientifically and practically though, application of accessibility in certain field still needs exploration. Air transport and HSR have become or are going to become the main long distance public transport modes mutually in many countries over the world. The concept of accessibility is not often applied in the planning and evaluation of air transport and HSR projects, which might be a problem, because the development of air transport and HSR projects requires large amount of investments, so that the policy makers need to be clear about the accessibility impact of these projects for their region. Furthermore, more and more regions are now served or expected to be served jointly by air transport and HSR. The complex influences of the interaction (including competition and complementation) of the two modes on each other and on the travel behaviour of individuals have drawn attention, yet these influences have not been explicitly interpreted. Therefore, this thesis presents an explorative research on the evaluation of the accessibility impact of combined air transport and HSR. The thesis is divided into a theoretical analysis and a case study. Various types of accessibility measures have been developed for accessibility evaluation, some of which are relatively easy to apply and interpret, while some of which are more comprehensive theoretically. In the evaluation of the accessibility measures of combined air transport and HSR, it is expected that the accessibility measures should ideally combine transport variables, land-use variables, individual variables, and air/HSR interaction variables. The time-scale of the evaluation is also seen as an important variable, because it determines the collection of data and the selection of the previous mentioned variables. In a policy evaluation, the time-scale variable needs to be predefined according to the purpose of the evaluation. Moreover, it is considered important that the accessibility impact measured can be combined in a broader social and/or economic evaluation, so that the policy makers can have a comprehensive view of the impact of the projects. Therefore, the usability in social and/or economic evaluation of the accessibility measures is considered an important variable that influences the selection of feasible measures. This thesis shows that different types of accessibility measures have their own advantages and disadvantages. Out of all the accessibility measures examined in the thesis, it is considered that potential measures and utility-based measures have relatively better trade-off between ideally combining the variables, and applicability and interpretability in a broader socio-economic evaluation. To test the applicability of these accessibility measures…