Holiday metro travel for people with disabilities: exploring spatiotemporal patterns and nonlinear built environment impacts

Abstract The unique physical characteristics and travel preferences of disabled individuals may lead to specific spatiotemporal characteristics of subway travel. This difference may also be temporally heterogeneous on holidays versus every day, and its association with the built environment may be significantly different. However, few studies have investigated such differences in depth. This study explores the differences in the spatiotemporal characteristics of subway travel for people with disabilities using subway swipe data from Wuhan, China, on the May 1 holiday and every day, and analyzes the effects of the built environment on holiday and everyday travel for people with disabilities compared to non-disabled people using XGBoost and SHAP models. The results show that compared with non-disabled people, the spatial and temporal changes of passenger flow of disabled people are less affected by holidays, and the spatial distribution of passenger flow and traveling time is reduced and contracted, respectively, based on weekdays. Second, the relative importance of each element of the built environment on metro passenger flows for the disabled and the non-disabled differed significantly, with medical facilities and network density being the most important variables for the disabled, both on holidays and weekdays. Comparatively, non-disabled people are more affected by holidays, with the highest contribution to disabled metro patronage on weekdays being made by food and beverage facilities, which changes to attractions on holidays. In addition, all built environment elements show nonlinear and significant threshold effects on disabled and non-disabled metro ridership. Finally, the built environment has an interaction effect on disabled subway passenger flow, for example, the closer to the sub-center, the higher the number of firms, the more inhibitory effect on disabled weekday and holiday subway passenger flow. The results of the study will contribute to an in-depth understanding of the spatial and temporal characteristics of metro travel for among disabled individuals, thereby developing disability-friendly measures for rail transit systems.