Earticle

Public transportation systems play key roles in supporting dynamic activities and interaction between urban places. Especially, high efficient public transportation systems are required in order to support large traffic demands in urban areas. In this paper, we define a new metric, structural activation level (SAL), to replace the conventional transportation share ratio (TSR) measuring efficiency of public transportation systems. First of all, we access the Korea Transport Database (KTDB) and download origin-destination data by transport types to construct traffic networks with respect to transport types for each city. Then, we calculate the QAP (Quadratic Assignment Procedure) correlation between each traffic network and the total traffic network for each city to investigate SAL by comparing cities one another. The results of our investigation reveal inconsistency between TSR and SAL. In Daegu, TSR of public transportation systems is relatively low while SAL is high. In Deajeon, however, SAL is low while TSR is high. Therefore, we suggest to take into consideration SAL as well as TSR in order to investigate the degree of activation of public transportation.