Towards a collective opinion generation approach with multiple objectives for evaluating rail transit station accessibility in urban areas

Urban rail transit can alleviate traffic congestion if sufficient ridership is achieved. The accessibility to rail transit stations largely determines public willingness to utilize urban rail transit. The current studies on the accessibility to rail transit stations tend to concentrate solely on individual rail transit lines or stations, neglecting the impact of the external macro-environment. Consequently, the outcomes of these measurements cannot accurately reflect the overall accessibility level of the region, nor do they furnish decision-makers with references for devising plans for rail transit development. This study introduces a novel approach for evaluating the accessibility to urban rail transit stations from a macro-level standpoint, utilizing expert knowledge. The present study conducts an analysis of the impact of political, economic, social, and technological factors on the accessibility to rail transit stations in urban areas. Subsequently, a comprehensive evaluation indicator system is developed based on the aforementioned analysis. Then, experts are summoned to provide their subjective evaluations for every indicator, which are depicted as probability distribution functions. The collective evaluation is derived through the aggregation of individual evaluations utilizing a bi-objective optimization approach that factors in both the collective fairness utility and the confidence level. Finally, the quantile average method is employed to consolidate the collective assessment outcomes of individual indicators, thereby deriving the level of accessibility to rail transit stations in urban areas. We design a small-scale application experiment and attempt to evaluate the accessibility to rail transit stations in Wuchang District, Wuhan with the proposed approach in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.