Journal of Regional and City Planning
Vol. 33 No. 3 (2022)

Influence of Centrality Indices of Urban Railway Stations: Social Network Analysis of Transit Ridership and Travel Distance

Seongman Jang (Department of Urban and Regional Development, Mokpo National University, Jeonnam 58554, Republic of Korea.)
Youngsoo An (Centre for Small Business Insights, Seoul Credit Guarantee Foundation, Mapo-gu, Seoul, 04130, Republic of Korea, +82-2-2174-5060)



Article Info

Publish Date
07 Jan 2023

Abstract

This empirical study calculated the network centralities of urban railway stations in Seoul using Social Network Analysis (SNA) and analyzed the effect of this value on the number of passengers and average travel distance at each station. Network centrality can be calculated using various methodologies. In this study, reach, betweenness, and closeness were used as network centrality indicators. A regression model was used with the characteristics of building use in the station catchment areas as control variables. This methodology was compared to previous studies’ methods for obtaining stations’ topology values. The adjusted R2 values increased by 0.272 and 0.220 for the respective models, explaining the number of passengers and the average travel distance, respectively; the number of significant variables also increased in both models. These results indicate that defining the network centrality obtained through SNA as the station’s topology could improve explanations of the number of passengers and the average travel distance by 27.2% and 22.0%, respectively, compared to previous studies. While this methodology is not new, this study demonstrated the advantages of using SNA to determine the centrality indices of urban railway stations.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jpwk

Publisher

Subject

Humanities Civil Engineering, Building, Construction & Architecture Environmental Science Social Sciences Transportation

Description

Journal of Regional and City Planning or JRCP is an open access journal mainly focusing on urban and regional studies and planning in transitional, developing and emerging economies. JRCP covers topics related to the analysis, sciences, development, intervention, and design of communities, cities, ...