Public Transit Analysis in ArcGIS
Model travel by public transit in a network screenshot

Model travel by public transit in a network

Include your GTFS data in a network dataset and use the Network Analyst extension in ArcGIS Pro to model trips by public transit to study things like access to jobs, commute times, and disparities in access.

The Network Analyst extension in ArcGIS includes tools for transportation analysis and routing, particularly for modeling and optimizing travel through a transportation network. You can include public transit schedule data in your transportation network in order to model travel by public transit for a variety of workflows in transportation and urban planning, public health, economic development, and so on.

You can learn more about network analysis with public transit in ArcGIS Pro here and follow this tutorial to prepare a routable network dataset using GTFS data and your street centerlines.

Once you have created your transit-enabled network dataset using the tools provided in ArcGIS Pro, you may be interested in doing some further analysis. The downloadable Transit Network Analysis Tools are a set of tools for performing transit-specific network analysis. They are intended to supplement the Network Analyst extension with functionality not available out of the box. In particular, the tools account for the time-dependent nature of public transit and assist with analyses commonly needed by those working with public transit. You can download this free toolbox from ArcGIS Online or GitHub.

  • Calculate Accessibility Matrix solves an Origin-Destination Cost Matrix analysis incrementally over a time window and summarizes the results. It can be used to count the number of jobs accessible to a set of origins within a reasonable commute time.
  • Calculate Travel Time Statistics calculates some simple statistics about the total transit travel time between locations over a time window and writes the output to a table.
  • Prepare Time Lapse Polygons and Create Percent Access Polygons help you visualize the area reachable by transit across a time window.
  • Copy Traversed Source Features With Transit returns the individual network segments traversed in a route enhanced with the wait time, ride time, and Run ID for each transit line used.