Improving elderly-oriented transportation in rural areas through a case study of Zhenglu Town.

Faced with the increasing contradiction between the elderly transportation and the traffic system in most rural areas, the road infrastructure enhancement, the bus service improvement, and the traffic safety management should be given full consideration. An investigation on current rural transportation infrastructures is first performed in the studied area, including the road network configuration, the traffic facility, the surface pavement, and the bus services. Meanwhile, to better grasp the trip behavior and characteristics, in-depth discussions on the elderly travel demands and experiences are performed based on field observation and public data, where the K-means clustering method is applied to identify different trip groups, and the natural language processing technology is adopted to extract specialized needs from public textual data. Based on the foregoing investigation and analysis, a hierarchical improvement framework for elderly-oriented rural traffic is then proposed, including network planning, transportation management, and facility configuration, where quantification models of evaluation indicators are established considering transit network topology and spatial demand distribution. Through a combined evaluation of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, the recommended strategies will greatly enhance the global network accessibility by upgrading the road network and reconstructing the bus network, and improve the trip safety and convenience by optimizing the maintenance works and bus services. Specially, under a three-layer rural bus network architecture, the enhancement rates of service coverage and average accessible distance are expected to be 26.2% and 54.6% respectively, at the expense of a 30.8% increase in the daily operation cost.