Effects of the built environment on travel distance in bus-oriented, medium-sized cities in China

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2024

Subject Area

place - asia, place - urban, mode - bus, ridership - behaviour, land use - impacts, land use - planning, land use - urban density

Keywords

Travel distance, Bus transit systems, Built environment, Medium-sized cities, Machine learning, Big data

Abstract

The impact of the built environment and weather conditions on travel behavior has been widely studied. However, limited studies have focused on better understanding such effects in medium-sized cities with bus-oriented transit systems, particularly from a separate perspective of travelers’ origins and destinations. We took Weinan, China, as a representative of second-tier cities in developing countries that concentrate on bus-oriented development strategies. New evidence of feature importance and nonlinear effects of crucial factors were revealed by an interpretable machine learning-based approach combining XGBoost and Shapley Additive Explanation (SHAP) with multi-source data. Most key factors were critical at both origins and destinations, such as the density of residential and commercial facilities. However, several important factors, such as road density and boarding time, had strong imbalanced effects on travel behavior. These findings provide novel insights and empirical implications to support urban planning strategies in medium-sized cities.

Rights

All contents licensed under Creative Commons by-nc 4.0. © 2019 Journal of Transport and Land Use

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