The Kuala Lumpur effect of spatial heterogeneity on passenger ridership of urban rail system

Abstract

The urban rail system is most significant for urban transport due to its faster, dedicated lane and mass capacity feature etc. Many countries or cities devout build it to relieve urban transport pressure. Whereas it is not every city could gain the expected outcome as they want after completing because of complication impacting factors. Furthermore, the gran investing could not be ignored. As well as the box-revenue also should be mentioned due to it is one of significant matter for this system which will guarantee urban rail system operating normally, meanwhile, it will represent the effectiveness in term of the urban traffic solution. As to it, the passenger flow is important for this system whether for which purpose. However, because of coupling effect which spatial heterogeneity and uneven ridership, it is worthy identify this inner correlation to acknowledge the impacting degree which generate more people using it. Thereby, this project report selects five variables to measure the impacting the passenger ridership for the MRT line located in the case city -Kuala Lumpur. Under this foundation, also attempts to reflect the Kuala Lumpur’s spatial heterogeneity by the uneven distribution ridership of the MRT line. The result indicates there is significant spatial heterogeneity due to the impacting degree is different in various station catchment area under the same measuring variable. For instance, the population variable has a higher impacting degree in the suburb area compared the core area, and the whole interval value is [-4.57, -0.42] that the discrepancy is around ten times from the highest to the lowest impacting coefficient. Besides, the commercial area and workplace which constitute Density variable positive correlate with MRT ridership that is opposite with population variable and the rest variables. Therefore, we could increase commercial and workplace around the station area to attract more people using MRT in order to generate more ridership as well as relieve the urban traffic stress.