A GIS-based method to assess the pedestrian accessibility to the railway stations

Modern cities, affected by congestion, atmospheric and acoustic pollution, land consumption, should change and return to being on a human scale, rather than designed for cars. Proper land-use planning, infrastructure improvement and implementation of targeted interventions have to ensure that there is a rapprochement of citizens about the public transport, in order to reduce these problems. An important aspect of modal choice by users of the public transport system is, however, linked to the quality of the pedestrian routes. In fact, every journey made by public transport begins and finishes on foot. Therefore, studying pedestrian accessibility to transit stations and the walkability of the pedestrian environment is really important, in order to understand how they influence the user’s choices. So, in this paper, a GIS-based method, useful for the assessment of the quality of pedestrian paths and accessibility to stations, is proposed. The measurement of the quality of road segments is useful for the redesign of the spaces, the planning of interventions on the pedestrian routes and the setting of the intervention priorities, developing a decision support system. Different indicators, linked to the pleasantness of the route, to practicability and to safety, which have a different influence on the user’s choice, have been chosen for the quality of the pedestrian routes. As a case study, some stations of the railway link of Palermo (Belgio, Francia and San Lorenzo) have been chosen, in order to identify solutions to be proposed to the municipal administration.