You are here

Sheih, "Evaluating the accessibility impacts of policy initiatives in Taipei: An application of integrating geographic information system (GIS) with urban transportation modeling system (UTMS)," 1995

USC Dissertation in Urban Planning.
August 26, 2009
Print

Jeng-Ying Shieh, Ph.D.

Abstract (Summary)
The fundamental contribution of this dissertation is to develop and implement a new prototype process by which UTMS, GIS and the theory of accessibility are combined to measure the impacts of alternative transportation programs on urban accessibility. The process will help planners looking for solutions to these transportation problems and help improve their decision-making environment. The methodologies used for this research are incremental analysis and with and without approach which assess policy alternatives by comparing the projected environment before and after certain alternatives established in an incremental comparison. The results of using this integration system and the methodologies show that transportation impacts based on accessibility, level of service, and isochronal maps are consistent with each other. The policy alternatives evaluated for this study are: (1) Construction of an eighty kilometer, multi-billion dollar mass rapid transit system (MRTF) in Taipei. (2) Dispersion of land use activities within the urban area to intensify land use in the Shinyi Center (LAND). (3) Consideration and relation of the reciprocal effects of the above two large investments upon the Taipei metropolitan area (LMRT). (4) Concentration of high density land use activities around major transportation MRT stations (STAN). The ranking sequences in a degrading order for those difference policy alternatives are STAN, MRTF, LMRT, and LAND.

This innovative use of technology makes it possible for planners to examine detailed accessibility impacts for each of the policy alternatives under consideration. By using GIS/UTMS, one can work with smaller transportation Traffic Analysis Zones and detailed, realistic transportation networks. In earlier efforts to compute accessibility indexes, the researcher was obliged to use crude approximations that could not capture the detail of competing transportation plans, and so could not properly evaluate policy alternatives between them. Integration of GIS and UTMS acts as a more realistic planning and simulation tool.

Advisor: Heikkila, Eric J.

Print