Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Procedia Engineering 178 ( 2017 ) 480 – 490 16thConference on Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication, RelStat’2016, 19-22 October, 2016, Riga, Latvia Evaluating Riga Transport System Accessibility Irina Yatskiv (Jackiva)*, Evelina Budilovich Transport and Telecommunication Institute. Lomonosova 1, Riga, LV-1019, Latvia Abstract Accessibility can be defined as the facility that helps people to reach a location to perform an activity. The research presents an overview of the case study: the accessibility analysis of the Riga public transport system. The transport system of Riga is presented and highlighted by the public transport services; the problems of public transport system and development plans are discussed. The author continues to analyse the project of the Riga Central Multimodal Public Transportation Hub that is planned in the frame of the Rail Baltica project and provides the analysis of the Riga Transport System accessibility in the current moment, before reconstruction. Accessibility was calculated on the base of the shortest journey time (or the fastest possible route) during the morning peak hours. The public transport accessibility was analysed and compared with the travel time by private cars. For the calculations, the author used Riga transport model, which is created in EMME software and supported by Riga municipality. The list of zones with the high level of travelling time that needs to be improved for more attractive public transport system was determined. © 2017 The The Authors. Authors. Published Published by Elsevierby Elsevier Ltd. Ltd.This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license Peer-review(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ under responsibility of the scientific). committee of the 16th International Conference on Reliability and Statistics in TransportationPeer-review under and responsibility Communication. of the scientific committee of the International Conference on Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication Keywords: urban transport system, public transport, accessibility, measures 1. Introduction A sustainable urban transport system (SUTS) requires the strengthening of various features of the system, including accessibility and mobility, reliability and efficiency, as well as safety and security, social equity, convenience and comfort. It should be people- and environmental-friendly. The Urban public transport system * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] 1877-7058 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the International Conference on Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication doi: 10.1016/j.proeng.2017.01.091 Irina Yatskiv (Jackiva) and Evelina Budilovich / Procedia Engineering 178 ( 2017 ) 480 – 490 481 (UPTS) should lead to enhanced mobility and generate greater equity between citizen groups. In order to achieve all these aspects, various challenges must be solved and one of the most important is the ability to measure all these features of the system. As represented in the report of the United Nations Economic Commission (UNECE, 2015)public transport is a main component of SUTS (see Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Sustainable urban transport system (UNECE, 2015). The UPTS is more attractive for commuters and more economically viable for operators if they offer the option to travel from one point of the city to another. Yatskiv and Budilovich in (2016) have analysed the main sustainability indicators which are significant for the Riga Transport System (RTS) and on the basis of the questionnaire have concluded that the accessibility is most important for the last one. Accessibility can be defined as the facility that helps people to reach a location to perform an activity. Providing a link between transportation and land-use models, accessibility can be seen as an indicator to assess transport and land-use policies, especially in urban structures. Morris et al. (1978) give a definition of accessibility. Litman (2012), Geursand van Wee (2013) provided an overview of literature into ‘accessibility’ and found different factors that affect accessibility: transportation demand and options, mobility, information, integration of the transport system etc. According to the definition, the level of accessibility depends on the location of activities, quality and quantity of infrastructures, as well as needs of people and companies. The level of accessibility has an impact on the economy because a well-functioning transport system in a combination with the land-use system is a condition for economic development. Accessibility is relevant for the economy, as well as fulfils a social role (van Wee, 2013). Litman in (2012) concluded that there is no single indicator to capture accessibility. In fact, it depends on the goal of the study how the accessibility should be measured. Litman in (2015) proposed that sustainable transportation indicators should reflect accessibility-based planning, that tends to consider additional planning objectives (improved mobility for non-drivers, energy conservation, improved safety, etc.) and additional solutions (improving alternative modes, more efficient pricing, more accessible land-use development etc.). Litman (2013) suggested that accessibility-based planning is recognising the following factors that affect accessibility: mobility, the quality of transport options, transport network connectivity and land-use accessibility concerning accessibility-based planning. The measures of accessibility are diverse and can be person-based, i.e. measuring the opportunities at the individual level or location-based, i.e. measuring the number of opportunities accessible from one location (Geurs and Ritsemavan Eck, 2001). The person-based accessibility accounts individual factors affecting one's ease of reaching its desired destination, whereas the location-based accessibility presents aggregated measures. The most common measure of the location-based accessibility is the cumulative opportunity measure, that counts the number of opportunities that can be accessed from one location within a given travel time (Geurs and van Wee, 2004). Several authors have written review articles on accessibility measures, focusing on certain perspectives, such as location accessibility (Handy and Niemeier, 1997), individual accessibility (Pirie, 1979; Kwan, 1998), economic benefits of accessibility (Koenig, 1980; Niemeier, 1997) or different perspectives (Geurs and van Wee, 2004). 482 Irina Yatskiv (Jackiva) and Evelina Budilovich / Procedia Engineering 178 ( 2017 ) 480 – 490 Van Wee (2013) offered the categorization of the accessibility measures by the following groups: • Infrastructure-based accessibility measures, analysing the performance or service levels of transport infrastructure: the length of infrastructure networks, the density of those networks, the level of congestion, and average travel speed on the road network. These accessibility measures are typically used in transport planning. • Location-based accessibility measures, analysing accessibility at locations, typically on a macro-level and describing the level of accessibility to spatially distributed activities, for example, ‘the number of jobs within 30 minutes’ travel time from origin locations’. • Person-based accessibility measures, analysing accessibility at the individual level, such as ‘the activities in which an individual can participate at a given time’. • Utility-based accessibility measures, analysing the (economic) benefits that people derive from access to the spatially distributed activities. This type of measure has its origin in the economic studies. The attempt to develop public transport (PT) accessibility measures has been discussed in the studies since the 1950s and continues to receive growing attention (Schoon et al., 1999). The project SUMMA (2003) fulfilled stands out among the above measures groups the following ones for PT accessibility: • Infrastructure-based: level of satisfaction of users of the public transport network; • Person-based: accessibility of the public transport network, commercial speed of the regional PTS. Mamun and Lownes (2011) point out the following measures: Service Coverage, Time-of-Day, Waiting Time, Service Frequency, Demographic data, Vehicle Capacity, Route Coverage, Travel Time, Travel Cost, Hours of Service, Walking Route, Access distance, Comfort & parking, Network connectivity, Vehicle Capacity. Alonso et al. in (2015) represented the density of public transport network as location-based accessibility measure and the quality of public transport as utility-based one. In many countries and cities the improving accessibility is an important government goal. For the development of the Riga transport system (RTS) exist a large number of documents that have been produced in the past few years and focused on the improvement of traffic and transport situations. These documents have different scopes, purposes and time scales but the visible roadmap for this implementation doesn’t exist. Yatskiv and Budilovich (2016) discussed the project Riga Central Multimodal Public Transportation Hub and provided the procedure for the evaluation of accessibility measures of RTS before and after the planned reconstruction. The aim of this research is to assess