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Measuring the Accessibility of Railway Stations in the Brussels Regional Express Network: a Node-Place Modeling Approach

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A Correction to this article was published on 20 August 2018

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Abstract

As a result of mounting concerns over the adverse ecological and socio-economic effects of mobility systems dominated by individual motorized transport, metropolitan areas worldwide have expressed a renewed interest in the role of public transport. Like many other metropolitan areas, the Brussels Capital Region (BCR) faces the problem of an increasingly congested transport system. Against this backdrop, the Regional Express Railway (RER) network is intended as a rapid-transit railway system serving an area of 30 km around the region, with the objective of improving the capacity and frequency of the railway services between the BCR and its periphery. In order to inform policy prescription, this paper reports on a systematic empirical assessment of all RER railway stations in terms of transport and land use characteristics, by drawing on the node-place modeling and transit oriented development literature. The proposed accessibility instrument considers different catchment area sizes in order to increase its empirical basis. Based on this systematic railway station inventory, cluster analysis was conducted revealing seven comparative accessibility profiles, of which some prove highly robust over the different precinct sizes. When combining the quantitative analyses reported in this paper with the more intuitive expertise of practitioners and stakeholders involved in the planning process, the accessibility instrument may effectively assist the identification of differentiated development opportunities for the RER stations.

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Change history

  • 20 August 2018

    The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The article title should read as “Measuring the Accessibility of Railway Stations in the Brussels Regional Express Network: a Node-Place Modeling Approach”.

Notes

  1. The exact borders have been revised several times and the results depend on the criteria and thresholds used (see also Dujardin et al. 2007 and Van Hecke et al. 2007).

  2. a new direct link between the Brussels-Schuman station (with the European Quarter) and the Halle-Vilvoorde railway line (towards the North of Brussels), also referred to as the Eastern orbital railway around Brussels.

  3. a new railway line serving Brussels National Airport, via the Brussels-Antwerp connection.

  4. available at http://esri.github.io/public-transit-tools

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Freke Caset

  2. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Freke Caset

  3. CIAUD, Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon (Rua Sá Nogueira), 1349-063, Lisbon, Portugal

    David S. Vale & Cláudia M. Viana

Authors
  1. Freke Caset
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  2. David S. Vale
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  3. Cláudia M. Viana
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Correspondence to Freke Caset.

Additional information

The original version of this article was revised: The article title should read as “Measuring the Accessibility of Railway Stations in the Brussels Regional Express Network: a Node-Place Modeling Approach”.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 4 Four aggregated economic sectors and their sub-sectors
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Appendix 2

Table 5 Correlations between indicators
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Appendix 3

Table 6 Cluster centre values and number of cases
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Caset, F., Vale, D.S. & Viana, C.M. Measuring the Accessibility of Railway Stations in the Brussels Regional Express Network: a Node-Place Modeling Approach. Netw Spat Econ 18, 495–530 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-018-9409-y

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