SIMPLIFYING COIMBRA AND ITS REGION - CONTRIBUTION FOR THE BETTER USE OF COLLECTIVE PUBLIC TRANSPORT IN THE INTERMUNICIPAL COMMUNITY OF THE COIMBRA REGION (CIM|RC)
Authors
Abstract
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer systems for capturing, storing, querying, analyzing and displaying geospatial data and its characteristics (Chang, 2010). From the massification of this technology and the strong spatial component of transport, GIS was reconciled with transport, rising the Geographic Information Systems for Transport (GIS-T), with methodologies and specific algorithms for the analysis of networks.Paraphrasing Silva (2006), "GIS-T enable integrated analysis of all components of a transport system in its geographic context."
The application of GIS to transport has grown in recent years, mainly as a tool to aid decision-making, analysis, monitoring and transport management to facilitate the movement of people, goods and information, ensuring access to mobility.
The main premise of this work is to automate the process of planning a trip using the public transport network (multimodal network) at intermunicipal level, making information available to the public with the help of the GIS functionalities. Aims to respond to the weakness of planning an intermunicipal travel - reconciling road transport (urban and regional), rail and pedestrian network - with the aim of improving accessibility.
Regarding the case study, was chosen the Region of Coimbra that as nineteen municipalities, with a considerable multimodal network, since there are no platforms that allow the planning of complex trips (with more than one mode of transportation) in an appropriate way on the part of the user, neither the planning of intermunicipal trips in the region.
For the simulation of the multimodal and intermunicipal network, four representative scenarios of our case study were defined that have as origin four different locations, belonging to the Region of Coimbra, and as destination the Hospital Central da Universidade de Coimbra. The information resulting from the creation of routes according to the preferences defined by the user, is the travel time, the associated fare (€), the total distance, the pedestrian distance, the mode of transportation, the stops/stations, the route until access transport, the transport route, the proposed trans-shipments, the waiting time and the timetable, for a journey that corresponds to the needs of the user.