The impact of a bus rapid transit line on spatial accessibility and transport equity: the case of Catania

Accessibility is a key issue to address spatial equity when planning for sustainable mobility. Accessibility indicators can be used to measure the performance of public transport as basic strategy to cause modal shift from private transport and reduce car dependence and urban sprawl. The purpose of this paper is to verify if the realization of a set of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines with high level of service can provide an equitable access of residents to workplaces, when compared with a light improvement of the commercial speed of conventional bus lines with low level of service but high spatial coverage. To this aim we use a relative accessibility measure between private and public transport, weighted by socio-economic data of population. A high spatial resolution spatial analysis is used to capture the relevance of different stop density for walking access impedance, through a GIS transport modeling software. The methodology is tested for the city of Catania (Italy).