Accessibility assessment of periurban areas in city region – case study of Coimbatore

Abstract

2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects by UN DESA indicates that “world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050, with close to 90% of this increase taking place in Asia and Africa”. In Indian context, a report titled “Urbanization beyond Municipal Boundaries: Nurturing Metropolitan Economies and Connecting Peri-Urban Areas in India” (World Bank, 2013), states that, “the rapid growth of metropolitan suburbs is the most striking feature of India’s spatial transformation”. These trends raise the challenge of transforming land use and expand infrastructure in the Indian metropolises and their suburbs. Several authors have studied about such peri-urban areas, and identified, inter alia, transport connectivity as one of the major challenges that require greater attention. Transportation sector may be viewed in hierarchical issues of a) moving volume of vehicular traffic, which is subset of (b) pattern of mobility, which is a further subset of (c) accessibility. Literature review of various accessibility studies indicates development and use of different accessibility measures and a major focus on public transport services and walkability. Many studies have been conducted across the world for assessing the accessibility level of the core city, but peri-urban areas have not been studied much in this context. This thesis-work adopts ‘PTAL - Index’ (Public Transport Accessibility Level), which is developed by London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham for studying a peri-urban area of a rapidly growing tier II metropolitan city in India (Coimbatore). This method of accessibility, involves certain assumptions of walking speed, walkable distance and reliability factor which has been suitably modified for Indian context. Studies done with PTAL-Index’ consider public transport services (Bus, BRTS, Metro, Mono rails etc.) for calculating accessibility levels. However, in India, Informal-IPT also contributes to public movement just as the other modes mentioned above, specifically where demand size at a given time is smaller or less. This thesis attempts to incorporate Informal-IPT along with public transport services. This study attempts to find out whether there exists a similar pattern of accessibility in the peri-urban areas. Further, attempts have been made to explore the role That is played by Informal- IPT services in the improving the accessibility levels offered by the conventional modes of public transport services. As a conclusion, it proposes appropriate strategies for improvement of the low accessible zones.