Improved Huff Model for Estimating Urban Rail Transit Station Catchment Areas considering Station Choices

Estimating urban rail transit station catchment areas is of great significance to deepening our understanding of Transit-Oriented Development in Chinese megacities. This study investigated station choices of residents and considered that residents may not only pay attention to the proximity to stations when the URT system develops into a relatively mature network. An improved Huff model was proposed to calculate the probability of residents’ station choice, which considered the station attractiveness. The station attractiveness is measured by three variables: walk score, public transport accessibility level, and service and facility index. The additive form based on multicriteria decision is adopted to incorporate experts’ opinions on the importance of three variables. In this study, extended catchment areas that can be accessed by cycling and feeder bus services are adopted to replace the conventional pedestrian-oriented catchment areas. A case study of Xi’an, China, was used to validate the applicability of the proposed methodology. The results revealed that the methodology effectively solved the problem. The findings could be used as a reference and provide technical support to policymakers and city planners with regard to the transport facilities configuration for URT station catchment areas, which contributes to facilitating transit-oriented development.