Public Transport Accessibility and Service Gap–Nablus City

The increasing interest in sustainable development has underlined the importance of accessibility concept as a key indicator to assess Public Transport (P.T) investments. To date measuring P.T accessibility in Palestine has been limited and local agencies have never had a specific and an accurate measure to assess local P.T service accessibility. This study outlines a proposed methodology for assessing accessibility of intra-city fixed route P.T service in Nablus City. Previous studies showed that there are mainly two different types of research related to the accessibility of P.T systems. The first type deals with measuring access to the P.T systems and the second deals with measuring access to destinations through P.T systems. The major aim of this thesis is to study these two types of research through developing two indices to reflect accessibility level for each type. These indices are a Local Index of Public Transport Availability (LIPTA) and Travel Time Accessibility Index (TTAI). The methodology of the study is based mainly on the quantitative and analytical methods using the collected data and the field survey of P.T frequency as well as travel time field data. ArcInfo v.10.0 Geographic Information System (GIS) program was used in analyzing and displaying the results by using the network analysis functions to measure spatial coverage of P.T service based on the actual walking distance on the pedestrian road network. The results of this study showed clearly that the proposed indices provide a suitable methodology to measure and assessing P.T accessibility for urban area; LIPTA confirmed that the study area in general has a good P.T service availability and there is a lack of service along the peripheral areas. On the other hand, TTAI showed that there is a gap between private car based and P.T-based accessibility for studied O-D’s. The study recommends that the Ministry of Transportation and local agencies should take into account the accessibility concept to improve the P.T services as part of a comprehensive short and long-term transport plan. Nablus Municipality should relay on study results to support some policies that encourage the use of P.T as alternative transport mode.