An Open-Source Framework of Generating Network-Based Transit Catchment Areas by Walking

The transit catchment area is an important concept for public transport planning. This study proposes a methodological framework to generate network-based transit catchment areas by walking. Three components of the framework, namely subgraph construction, extended shortest path tree construction and contour generation are presented step by step. Methods on how to generalize the framework to the cases of the directed road network and non-point facilities are developed. The implementation of the framework is provided as an open-source project. Using metro stations in Shanghai as a case study, we illustrate the feasibility of the proposed framework. Experiments show that the proposed method generates catchment areas of high geospatial accuracy and significantly increases computational efficiency. The open-source program can be applied to support research related to transit catchment areas and has the potential to be extended to include more routing-related factors.