Examining the Potential Travellers in Catchment Areas for Public Transport

The paper presents a method to examine the catchment areas for stops in high quality public transport systems based on the actual street network in the examined area. This is achieved by implementing the service area functions from the ArcGIS extension Network Analyst. The method is compared to a more simple method using only the Euclidean distance from the examined stop and the paper describes the differences in detail-level of the results. Furthermore, the paper describes how the Network Analyst method can be use to examine improvements in the catchment areas by adding extra entrances to stations or by making changes in the street network around the station. It is concluded that the Network Analyst method improves the detail-level and accuracy in catchment area analyses. It is these improvements which makes it possible to examine changes in station entrances and/or street network.