On Multi-Timescale Ridership Changes Of Metro Stations Using Smart Card Records

Metro transit in China has experienced rapid development in the past period of time,and issues of improvements in urban metro's travel efficiency and service qualities are catching increasing concerns,which promotes need for insights on regularities of urban travels.As key plots for urban travels,stations along metro lines are places where complicated and periodical changes in transit ridership exist under different timescales.Systematic interpretations are needed as the rich information behind the changes can be significant for practices like understanding regularities of travel behavior changes,giving guidelines to urban transportation planning and conducting station-area development.Based on metro smart card records,this study analyses the various regularities of metro station ridership changes under multiple timescales.First,domestic and overseas related studies on metro station ridership changes and expressing methods of transit ridership are reviewed,and related theories and analytical methods are introduced.Second,according to the summary of present studies,an analytical frame consisting of microscopic(morning against afternoon peak in one day),mesoscopic(weekday against weekend in one week)and macroscopic(beginning against end time node in a multi-year operation phase)timescales is established.Next,taking the first networked operation phase from year 2011 to 2016 of Shenzhen metro as example,analyses are carried out on metro stations' regular and irregular ridership changes under each timescale.Last,different environmental influences on station ridership under each timescale are investigated respectively in global(location)and local(surrounding)contexts.Results show that different regular and irregular characteristics can be found in metro stations' ridership changes under multiple timescales.For ridership changes under micro timescale,the most major and pervasive travel behavior is commuting travel in morning and afternoon peaks.For meso timescale,there are generally delayed travels in stations' weekend ridership besides existing peak-hour commuting travels.For macro timescale,there is holistic and balanced growth in stations' travels while the constitution of behaviors keeps steadily unchanged.Irregular peaks,irregular in-week changes and irregular growth of each timescale exist in several case stations in different conditions.There is significant influence of station environment factors on ridership changes.Land use function around station area is the essential reason for the diversity of microscale changes,and stations' macroscale ridership growth is the joint effect of stations' locations and surrounding environ-ments.It is the purpose of this study to offer rational advice to urban metro traffic planning and management.