Examining Built Environment Effects on Metro Ridership at Station-to-Station Level considering Circle Heterogeneity: A Case Study from Xi’an, China

Abstract

Transit-oriented development is described as a geographic unit with multicircle structures. Most studies have analysed the impact of the built environment within station catchment areas on metro passenger flows from a macro perspective and have lacked analysis of the circle heterogeneity. Few relevant studies have independently investigated the impact of the built environment on the passenger flow in each circle and indeed neglected the systematic interaction between inner circles and circles in the TOD area. In this study, the 800 m buffer from the station was equally divided into four circles. Based on the gravity model, the representative built environment features around the metro stations on both sides were extracted using the block attention module (BAM). Subsequently, Shapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) was used to explore the influence of different built environment variables on passenger flow at each circle between the origin and destination stations. The results indicate the following: (1) the station-to-station passenger flow is significantly affected by the availability of transfers and the distance between the origin and destination stations; (2) the impact of different built environments on ridership significantly varies within different circles; and (3) the built environment has a similar impact on average daily passenger flow on both sides. Therefore, this study proposes strategies to optimize the metro passenger flow by developing different land use in different circles and updating the urban spatial structure.