According to a recent School of Cities study, “Good public transit connects people to places. Ideally, this is done efficiently and sustainably, with transit routes and stations serving and connecting the most amount of people possible. But in reality, there's a lot of variation within and between cities in how effectively this is done.”
In order to more effectively compare rail transit and population in various cities, Aniket Kali and Jeff Allen have created interactive maps of 250 of the most populated urban regions around the globe which show major rail transit lines and stations overlaid population density.
Kali is a research assistant and Allen a senior research associate and lead, data visualization, both with the School of Cities.
Seeing how varied cities are in terms of their urban geography and the geometry of their rail networks is pretty cool. Each city is unique in its own way, stemming from its topography and history of development.
In addition to creating the maps, they computed several metrics examining characteristics of transit-oriented development, and ranked how well cities perform relative to each other. Generally, the greater the density and proportion of the population that lives near major rail transit, the better.
For example, the maps and accompanying metrics show that 70 per cent of the urban population in Osaka, Japan, lives within 1km of a major rail transit station while in Toronto, that figure is 20 per cent.
“Seeing how varied cities are in terms of their urban geography and the geometry of their rail networks is pretty cool,” says Allen. “Each city is unique in its own way, stemming from its topography and history of development.
“Of course, where people live is just one piece. The goal of transit is ultimately to take people where they want to go — work, school, recreation, et cetera — so it would be great to layer on employment and activity location data onto these maps to also look at the destination side of the equation as well as analyze connectivity of networks. Something to work on in the future!”
- To read the full study and view the maps, visit Rail Transit & Population Density.