Planning for nodes, places and people in Flanders and Brussels: Developing an empirical railway station assessment model for strategic decision-making

Abstract

Against the backdrop of current policy discussions in Flanders dealing with differentiated urban development schemes for strategic railway stations, this paper develops an empirical railway station assessment tool. We build on the node-place modeling literature, and more specifically on the tradition of quantitative station assessment models which has emerged from it. First, a series of methodological contributions are proposed in which we suggest strategies to improve the analytical strength of some standard node-place parameters, we broaden the model with temporal variability in accessibility, and we complement the model with a user-based accessibility account. Second, the conceptual model is applied to the case of Flanders and Brussels (the north of Belgium). Drawing on factor and cluster analysis, two intelligible station typologies are produced for both node-place and user-based data. Both typologies are interpreted and complemented with station-specific rose diagrams summarizing a station’s accessibility profile. These diagrams reveal insightful and detailed knowledge about station-specific accessibility characteristics, some of which are not captured by standard node-place analyses. Lastly, a more in-depth discussion focusing on five exemplary cases reveals what the results of these analyses may mean for planning practice.

Regional Urbanisation through Accessibility?—The “Zweite Stammstrecke” Express Rail Project in Munich

“…It allows visually to identify "unsustained nodes" and "unsustained places" (stations with an accessibility surplus over the local density of functions and vice versa), as well as "dependent" and "stressed" stations, that are balanced but in danger of inefficiency or overcrowding. The model has been operationalised and tested in various settings (e.g., [82,83]), and several additions have been proposed to derive more detailed station typologies (e.g., [84]). For this paper, we assumed the accessibility values from the second step as node values and the combined functional data (population size, firms and facilities) as place values.…”

Place quality in high-speed rail station areas: Concept definition

“…This possibly interprets that why developed countries pay more attention to the study of place quality, particularly to the experiential dimension, than the developing countries do (Figure 4,right). It is foreseeable that with the spatial interventions implemented and land use adjusted, the demand for and attention to the place quality in developing countries probably will shift from the economic lens and the spatial lens to the experiential lens (Caset et al, 2019;Rodríguez & Kang, 2020).…”

Estaciones como nodos y lugares: el potencial del tren para el desarrollo urbano orientado al transporte en Santiago, Chile

“…Una amplia literatura sobre el tema (véase la revisión de Lyu, Bertolini y Pfeffer, 2016) ha utilizado el modelo para analizar cortas líneas y densas redes nacionales, contemplando un radio de influencia distinto alrededor de las estaciones en base a su rol y posición en contextos urbanos o en superficies de baja densidad (usualmente, 400 o 800 metros para zonas urbanas caminables y 1500 metros para estaciones accesibles en auto) . Sucesivas aplicaciones del modelo han ido elaborando análisis más sofisticados que, en sectores con un fuerte uso del tren, han logrado estudiar también el diseño de las estaciones y las experiencias de los usuarios (Caset, Derudder, Witlox, Teixeira y Boussauw, 2019). La versatilidad del modelo nodo-lugar sugiere la posibilidad de aplicarlo en regiones en que el modelo no ha recibido aún aplicaciones prácticas, como en Chile, y en donde los resultados podrían fortalecer el rol aún incipiente que el tren juega en la movilidad a escala metropolitana.…”