Transit-based accessibility and urban development: An exploratory study of Shenzhen based on big and/or open data

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) degree, the correlation between transit-based accessibility and urban development, reflects to what extent TOD shapes urban form. This paper empirically examines the shifting patterns of TOD degree and its correlates by using publicly available big and/or open data (BOD) such as point of interest (POI) and OpenStreetMap data for Shenzhen, China, a city experiencing rapid growth/changes in recent decades. The BOD used contain up-to-date information of human activities in finer spatiotemporal resolutions than traditional data. The paper illustrates how BOD can be utilized to quantify TOD degree and its correlates in 2014 and 2017. The main findings are twofold. First, bus stops, a proxy for bus-based accessibility, were found to markedly influence urban development (measued by the number of POIs with social media check-ins) around a (planned) metro station in 2014, when the local metro system was still in devleopment. Second, the impacts of the metro-based accessibility (measured by the average time to the two central business districts) on urban development became larger than those of the accessibility to bus stops as the local metro system matured. It is recommended that decision-makers should systematically consider and harness those effects over time to better promote TOD degree.