Impact of Road Network Topology on Public Transportation Development

Planning of road networks is fundamental for public transportation. The impact of road network density on public transportation has been extensively studied, but few studies in this regard involved evaluation indicators for connectivity and layout of road networks. With 29 cities in China as the study cases, this paper quantifies the layout structure of the road network based on the network’s betweenness centralization and establishes a multivariate linear regression model to perform regression of the logarithm of the frequency of per capita public transportation on betweenness centralization. It is found in the present work that there is a significant correlation between the layout structure of an urban road network and the residents’ utilization degree of public transportation. A greater betweenness centralization of the urban road network, namely a more centralized road network, means a higher frequency of per capita public transportation of urban residents and a higher degree of the residents’ utilization of public transportation. In the development of public transportation, centralized and axial-shaped layout structures of road networks can be promoted to improve the utilization of public transportation.