How do people get to the railway station? The Dutch experience

The quality of transport networks does not only depend on the quality of the individual links and nodes, but also on the way these nodes and links function in the context of multimodal networks. In the present paper we focus on multimodal trips where the railways are the main transport mode. We discuss detour and frequency problems related to multimodal transport chains. Local accessibility of railway stations is an important determinant of railway use in the Netherlands. We find that the propensity to make use of rail services by people living in the ring between 500 to 1000 meters from a railway station is about 20% lower than of people living at most 500 meters away from railway stations. At distances between 1.0 and 3.5km the distance decay effect is about 30%, and above this distance it may reach values up to 50%. Non-motorized transport modes are dominant at both the home-end and the activity-end. A rather unique feature of the home-end access mode is the high share of the bicycle. More than one out of every three passengers uses the bike on the trip from home to station. At the activity-end the share of the bike is much smaller, because of the asymmetry in the supply of this transport mode in the home versus activity-end. This explains the dominant position of walking as the access mode at the activity-end. Implications are discussed for physical planning and the need for facilities near railway stations.