This study aimed to evaluate the spatial accessibility of tourism attractions in the urban destination city. An analytical framework for assessing urban tourism accessibility at different spatial scales was proposed to provide references on the interaction of urban transport and tourism systems. In addition to the travel time-based measure, a modified gravity model integrating the tourism destination attractiveness, urban transport system characteristics, and tourist demand distribution was developed to evaluate tourism accessibility in this study. Real-time travel data obtained from the Web Maps service were used to take the actual road network operation conditions into consideration and improve the accuracy of estimation results. Taking Nanjing as an example, the analysis results revealed the spatial heterogeneity of tourism accessibility and inequality in tourism resource availability at different levels. Road transport service improvement plays a dominant role in increasing tourism accessibility in areas with insufficient tourism resources, such as the outskirts of the destination city. As for areas with abundant attractions, authorities could pay attention to destination attractiveness construction and demand management in addition to the organization and management of road network operations around attractions during holidays. The results of this study provide a potentially valuable source of information for urban tourism destination management and transport management departments.

In small and medium-sized cities of China, walking plays an important role as a green and healthy way to travel. However, the intensification of motorized travel and poor planning of pedestrian transportation systems have resulted in poor travel experiences for residents. To encourage residents to change their mode of travel from motorized transport to greener modes, it is necessary to consider the characteristics of walking travel, design good walking street environments, and increase the advantages of walking in the downtown areas of small and medium-sized cities. In this study, a spatial environment model of a pedestrian street was constructed based on the walking score. Visual perception elements, street function elements, and walking scale elements were acquired by semantic segmentation of Baidu street view images obtained with the DeepLab model. Points of interest (POI) were obtained based on surveys, measurements, and the space syntax. Considering walking distances for small and medium-sized cities, the attenuation coefficient of a reasonable facility distance was adopted to modify the walking score. Based on the comprehensive score obtained, walking paths were divided into four categories: functionally preferred, visually preferred, scale preferred, and environmentally balanced. This categorization provides theoretical support for the design of pedestrian street space environments. Taking the pedestrian street in the city center of Gaoping in Shanxi Province, China as an example, the feasibility of the method and model was verified.

Estimating urban rail transit station catchment areas is of great significance to deepening our understanding of Transit-Oriented Development in Chinese megacities. This study investigated station choices of residents and considered that residents may not only pay attention to the proximity to stations when the URT system develops into a relatively mature network. An improved Huff model was proposed to calculate the probability of residents’ station choice, which considered the station attractiveness. The station attractiveness is measured by three variables: walk score, public transport accessibility level, and service and facility index. The additive form based on multicriteria decision is adopted to incorporate experts’ opinions on the importance of three variables. In this study, extended catchment areas that can be accessed by cycling and feeder bus services are adopted to replace the conventional pedestrian-oriented catchment areas. A case study of Xi’an, China, was used to validate the applicability of the proposed methodology. The results revealed that the methodology effectively solved the problem. The findings could be used as a reference and provide technical support to policymakers and city planners with regard to the transport facilities configuration for URT station catchment areas, which contributes to facilitating transit-oriented development.

Taxi fleet size has undergone a continuous rapid growth in Chinese cities, while the service facility layout planning has relatively lagged behind, causing a decrease in the service quality. Therefore, it is crucial to carry out taxi service centre layout planning. This study analyses the functional orientation and hierarchical layout mode of taxi service centres, and then proposes stepwise layout planning methods combining existing transportation facilities. Considering the demand for integrated service centres is relatively low and convenient service centres are highly flexible, their layout can be determined by qualitative analysis. The constrained layout model of functional service centres is established by optimizing the layout scheme among various alternative taxi service centres. The study finds the model is a mixed 0-1 integer programming problem, genetic algorithms are applied to solve it. Finally, the proposed methods are applied to a real case of Jiangning district, Nanjing. The results show that one integrated service centre, four functional service centres, and twenty-three convenient service centres could satisfy taxi drivers' demand, which suggests that the proposed methods should effectively address the layout planning problem of taxi service centres, thus have important implications for other cities' downtown areas in China and beyond.