Public Transport Planning: GIS For Public Transportation Planning

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GIS for Public Transportation Planning

The need for good public transportation services is quite certainly apparent, particularly for developed cities. Without it, everyone would either need to locate themselves close to place of work, or everyone has to use some alternative means of private transport. For large cities, where there are millions of people that need to travel on daily basis, it is simply not possible for all of this movement to function well without public transportation (Johnson 2004, p. 4). For a developed city to have good public transportation services, this does not happen by accident. City and town planners need the appropriate tools to conduct the work of creating appropriate plans for public transport, land use …show more content…

For instance, a specific travel route can begin with walking to a bus stop, then taking a bus to a tram stop where a transit to a tram ride occurs. Subsequently tram travel is made to a location where subsequently walking is required to the final destination. With GIS applications, this type of routing analysis can be done fairly quickly and easily. Given a fair amount of assumptions, such as an average walk speed, it is possible to arrive at a fairly good estimate of travel time. The pedestrian road data informs the portion of the travel which is the walking parts of the route. The tram data informs the portion of the travel informs the portion of the travel which is that involving taking the tram. The GIS tool (for instance ArcGIS or QGIS) offers shortest route analysis functions that enable this type of route analysis to be completed. There are also network analysis functions in GIS applications that allow for service area analysis to be made. This enables the mapping of areas that are within a certain or distance of time of travel away from facilities or resources.
In order for GIS applications, to be effective, one has to bring data into the GIS application. And different GIS applications will have different capabilities for supporting importing or loading of geospatials datasets. A very common format for importing geospatial data is ESRI shapefiles. Yet another common …show more content…

Certain analysis and functions will be more easily performed with one tool compared to another. Each tool will have various features, advantages and disadvantages. There is also the need for any user to become acquainted and familiar with the particular tool in order to be effective. There are also tools that are more "open" than others. Some tools require obtaining software and paying for it before one can use the tool. Thus, for certain situations this may present a barrier. There are also online GIS tools like CartoDB that can be quite effective for sharing map data and applications with other people. These tools do not have the same repertoire of analytical functions that a tool like ArcGIS would have, and so it is best to be aware of the capabilities of various tools so that one can employ the right tool for the

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