Time of Day Dependency of Public Transport Accessibility in the Czech Republic - Geoinformatics for Intelligent Transportation - page 93

and regional working time conditions the parameters for limiting public transport
conditions are set.
Except of the sensitivity to basic parameters setting, typical location-based
measures usually suffer from following limitations: they do not take into account
individuals

behaviour (perceptions and preferences), no capacity restrictions are
applied, no possibility to combine destinations is included and only one-way
transport is used for calculation. The last limitation has been discussed by

'

Š ed ě n-

kov et al. [ 13 ] arguing that especially for the 2nd work shift, the number of

accessible municipalities is decreased in average by 80 % if a return connection is
requested, what reveals the real weaknesses of the public transport system. Also
Ivan et al. [ 14 ] emphasized the importance of return connection existence after the
work shift in evaluations of public transport accessibility. The average decrease of
accessible municipalities due to missing return connection is about 50 % for the
morning shift and almost 90 % for the afternoon shift.
The accessibility is usually studied according to a transport mode used for a
journey. In the Czech Republic (CR) the public transportation still represents a very
important mode for commuting. In 2011, 56.9 % of passengers used public
transport (11.5 % excluding urban public transport). According to the total pas-
senger transport performance (expressed in passenger-kms) the share of public
transport is 39.6 % (25.5 % excluding urban public transport) [ 15 ].
Improvement of commuting conditions represents one of the important ways,
how to provide better conditions for employees and attract missing labour force [ 16 ].
Better understanding of the public transport potential remains essential for improved
land use and urban planning, decreasing of social, rural-urban and peripheral-
agglomeration disparities, and more ef

á

cient utilisation of public budgets.
Even though the understanding of public transit accessibility is important for
encouraging mode shifts to reduce car reliance and is essential for the wellbeing of
non-car households, still the relatively little research on accessibility using public
transit exists [ 17 , 18 ]. The public transport accessibility in CR is evaluated by i.e.
Seidenglanz [ 19 ] or Marada and Kv [ 20 ] who are usually focused on rural and

peripheral areas documenting their bad transport serviceability. Kraft and Van

ě to ň

ura
[ 21 ] compare conditions of accessibility of Prague by public transport and by car.
They discover the more signi

č

cant variability of time accessibility and average
speed is in the case of public transport.
One of the most important issues in choosing a travel mode is the dependency
on time of day because the time is more important than distance or monetary costs
[ 22 , 23 ].
The demand for transportation changes during the day. Usually used evaluation
is focused on selection of time slot (typically morning) and

did not take into account other requests arisen during the day. From the practical
point of view the bad accessibility in secondary time slots may be serious barriers
for commuting to services, for taking a job with more work shifts or for applying
fl

“ the best appropriate ”

flexible working hours.
The aim of the study is to evaluate accessibility across the Czech Republic and
assess the dependency on time slots used for commuting by public transport.