Rail Station Access (Scoping)

Any journey by passenger rail includes several components outside the direct on-train experience, including access and egress to rail stations. The overall experience of using public transport and rail is therefore strongly influenced by passenger experience and convenience in accessing stations. The access capacity of various modes also directly relates to ridership generated at a particular location.

Journeys by rail must be time competitive against the alternative by private vehicle. In addition, the time taken to access and egress from stations is often an important component in the overall time taken for a given rail journey. Station access is achieved almost entirely by the four major modes of walking and cycling, feeder buses, and cars (primarily through park & ride or also kiss & ride drop-off, in addition to taxis). While much access planning in recent years has focused on expanding park and ride capacity, walk-up access is still the dominant mode of station access.

Intermodal facilities for feeder buses are often minimal, and limited planning is undertaken for infrastructure and capacity to support walking and cycling access to a given target level. These three important modes require more attention and more active planning and infrastructure investment to achieve their full potential, especially given the cost advantages that they offer.

Park and ride is also still important and needs careful, strategic consideration in order to locate facilities to best effect, while consideration also needs to be given to staging facilities.

In seeking to understand the relationships between passenger rail patronage and access requirements, new tools and techniques that provide both quantitative and qualitative analyses of stations and their access infrastructure are required.

This project represents an early-stage scoping exercise, primarily in the form of a literature review, industry engagement and proposal development for a more in-depth research program in station access planning and infrastructure.