Evaluation of Existing Bus Stop Accessibility and Determination of Optimal Location For Bus Stops Using GIS Techniques: A Case Study of Yeka Sub City, Addis Ababa

Abstract

Accessibility is, “The ease of reaching some destination, and include real or perceived costs in terms of time or money, distance travelled, level of comfort, availability and reliability of public transport, or combination of these”. Addis Ababa is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, yet is constrained by poor accessibility of City Bus Services and people spend more time and money on travel due to inadequate infrastructures such as public transport routes and bus stop location, road network, poor transport operation, bus stop spacing, limited extent of Anbessa bus service coverage had resulted inaccessible service to the users. The current study identified a problem of lack of spatial information on Anbessa Bus Service Accessibility for each bus stop in Yeka Sub City, Addis Ababa City that peoples spend more time & money on travel is becoming a serious problem nowadays. The current study focused on evaluating accessibilityof existing bus stop and identify the spatial information of bus stop location and determine the best locations of bus stops in order to serve most users in its urban setting and to ensured optimum accessibility.The two important factors of accessibility index, which was measured based on three criteria: Road Density, Population Served and Trip Generation and bus stop spacing standard of 800meters are considered in the current study to identify the optimal locations of bus stops. GIS based service area analysis was used to evaluate bus stop accessibility and identify bus stop locations based on actual geography of pedestrian road network, road length within realistic bus stop service area. The current study focused on evaluating the accessibility of existing bus stops with its location and standard stop spacing and determined the optimal location of bus stops to ensure bus service accessibility. The evaluation of existing bus stops accessibility results in Yeka Sub City generally poor in status that most of the bus stops more than 70% in both inbound and outbound direction are categorized as poor & provide comparatively less accessibility. Determination of optimal location for bus stop accessibility by applying four mitigation measures of creating new bus stops, keeping bus stops in their original location, relocating and dissolving unnecessary bus stops were better than the existing once which increased by more than 60% in both directions of bus stops. Generally, after proposed optimal locations, the inbound and outbound good and moderate bus stop accessibility were improved to (62.21% and 75.59%) respectively. Besides poor accessibility of bus stop was diminished to less than of 30% in both directions of bus stops. Similarly, 13,552 populations for proposed inbound and 11, 298 for proposed outbound direction bus stop are included and they could be served by bus.