Accessibility Impact Analysis of New Public Transit Projects in Cairo, Egypt
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Accessibility Impact Analysis of New Public Transit Projects in Cairo, Egypt By Adham Kalila B.Eng in Civil Engineering McGill University Montreal, Canada (2012) Master of Science in Transportation Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts (2018) Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Urban Planning at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY June 2019 © 2019 Adham Kalila. All Rights Reserved The author hereby grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Author________________________________________________________________________ Department of Urban Studies and Planning 05/21/2019 Certified by____________________________________________________________________ Professor Sarah Williams Department of Urban Studies and Planning Thesis Supervisor Accepted by___________________________________________________________________ Professor of the Practice, Caesar McDowell Co-Chair, MCP Committee Department of Urban Studies and Planning Accessibility Impact Analysis of New Public Transit Projects in Cairo, Egypt By Adham Kalila Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 21, 2019 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Urban Planning Abstract The New Urban Communities (NUC), built around Cairo, developed to relieve congestion and pull away residents from the crowded core, have not successfully attracted a significant number of residents. Since NUCs are not well connected by official public transport to the inner city, their residents rely on private cars and informal or expensive private mass transit to reach the job markets of inner Cairo. Although in official strategy plans, no direct link is drawn between the difficulty of moving between and within NUCs and their low occupancy rates, NUCs can be attractive places to live for diverse socio-economic groups if their accessibility to jobs and points of interest were improved. There is growing interest from the World Bank and the Egyptian government to invest in public transport routes in the Greater Cairo Region to improve job accessibility and relieve traffic congestion. Applying existing methods to measure the impact of different routes on job accessibility requires data on the location and density of jobs which is not readily available in many data-poor cities in the global south. A novel method was applied to produce a job density data set, combining scraped location and categorical data on businesses from online directories with official census and survey data on job numbers and industry types. This thesis explores the locations of employment opportunities in the absence of official data and the accessibility of the population to these opportunities in the Greater Cairo Region in order to assess the different levels of accessibility to jobs by public transport and inform the priorities of future investment in public transport provision. The research results in recommendations on where 3 routes, out of 10 given corridors, should be placed based on the impact of these new transit lines towards job accessibility. Using location-based accessibility models combined with a novel approach to developing job location data, the work identifies bus routes that performed the best in getting the largest number of people to jobs given considerations of socio-economic equity. Thesis Supervisor: Sarah Williams Title: Associate Professor of Technology and Urban Planning 2 Contents 1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................... 8 1.1 RESEARCH QUESTION AND HYPOTHESIS ............................................................................................. 12 1.2 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS .............................................................................................................. 13 2 LITERATURE AND HISTORY REVIEW ................................................................................................... 14 2.1 A POLITICAL HISTORY OF CAIRO ....................................................................................................... 14 2.1.1 New Urban Communities in Egypt ........................................................................................ 19 2.2 A REVIEW OF CAIRO TRANSPORT STUDIES ......................................................................................... 21 2.3 A REVIEW OF ACCESSIBILITY STUDIES ................................................................................................ 23 2.3.1 More Complex Measures of Accessibility .............................................................................. 26 2.3.2 Software and Implementation Methods ............................................................................... 28 3 DATA COLLECTION ............................................................................................................................. 29 3.1 OPPORTUNITIES DATA .................................................................................................................... 29 3.1.1 Web Scraping and Category Selection .................................................................................. 30 3.1.2 Data Cleaning ....................................................................................................................... 32 3.2 PUBLIC TRANSPORT ROUTE DATA ..................................................................................................... 33 3.2.1 Existing Transport Data ........................................................................................................ 33 3.2.2 Frequency Data Collection .................................................................................................... 35 3.2.3 Future Transport Data .......................................................................................................... 36 3.3 CORRIDOR SELECTION FOR POTENTIAL PUBLIC TRANSPORT INTERVENTION .............................................. 38 3.4 POPULATION DATA ........................................................................................................................ 39 4 METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................................................. 41 3 4.1.1 Limitations of the Accessibility method chosen .................................................................... 42 4.2 H3 HEXAGONS AS UNIT OF ANALYSIS ................................................................................................. 43 4.2.1 Boundaries of the Greater Cairo Region Study Area ............................................................. 43 4.3 THE OPPORTUNITIES (SPATIAL EMPLOYMENT) MODEL ......................................................................... 45 4.4 CREATING THE GTFS ...................................................................................................................... 47 4.5 THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MODEL .............................................................................................. 50 5 RESULTS ............................................................................................................................................ 52 5.1 CURRENT SITUATION IN THE GREATER CAIRO REGION .......................................................................... 52 5.1.1 Population GCR 2018 ............................................................................................................ 52 5.1.2 Job Distribution ..................................................................................................................... 54 5.1.3 Job Accessibility .................................................................................................................... 57 5.2 COMPARISON OF CORRIDORS FOR INTERVENTION ............................................................................... 60 5.2.1 Equity Considerations ........................................................................................................... 61 5.2.2 Single PPTI Results ................................................................................................................ 62 5.2.3 Double PPTI Results .............................................................................................................. 65 5.3 FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS ............................................................................................................. 68 6 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................................... 70 6.1 DETAILS ON THE FINDINGS OF THE STUDY .......................................................................................... 71 6.2 NON-ACCESSIBILITY FINDINGS ......................................................................................................... 73 6.3 FUTURE WORK ............................................................................................................................. 75 7 REFERENCES ....................................................................................................................................... 77 4 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3. 1 Future Transport Projects and NUC locations in the GCR. Source: Transport for Cairo ..............................................................................................................................................