Journal of Transport and Land Use (Jun 2024)

Does yesterday’s accessibility shape today’s TOD-nesses in metro station areas? A tale of Shenzhen, China

  • Jiangping Zhou,
  • Yuling Yang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.2024.2361
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17, no. 1

Abstract

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As an overarching policy and development model, transit-oriented development (TOD) is widely used to promote the integration of land use and transit services, which arguably brings about many benefits. TOD advocates have continuously paid much attention to metro station areas (MSAs), i.e., areas within a reasonable walking distance to a metro station. To TOD advocates, well-planned MSAs should have a sufficient supply of TOD-nesses encapsulating characteristics such as destinations, density, diversity, and design. In the existing scholarship, however, little has been done on (a) TOD-nesses’ potential “consumers,” the population that is only a short metro ride away from an MSA, i.e., the metro-based accessibility (MBA) to the consumers of the MSA; and (b) whether and how TOD-nesses of one MSA and several MSAs in proximity are affected by the MBA. With the help of big and/or open data, we examine whether and to what degree the MBA of an MSA cluster (MSAC), a set of MSAs within t minutes of a metro ride from a metro station is correlated to that MSAC’s TOD-nesses in Shenzhen, China. We measure the MBA by the daytime/nighttime population in the same MSAC. We quantify TOD-nesses using the published indices or the averages of the indices in a refereed article. Coefficient of geography association, Gini index, pairwise correlation, and linear regression analyses are carried out. We find that the MBA in one period significantly predicts MSAC-level TOD-nesses in ensuing periods. However, the MBA’s prediction power decreases or even disappears over time. Besides, metro station characteristics such as the jurisdiction membership significantly predict the overall TOD-nesses and individual aspects of the TOD-nesses after controlling for the MBA. Our study thus sheds new light on meso- or MSAC-level TOD-nesses and related policy and planning evaluation.

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