Análise da acessibilidade de pedestres às estações de integração dos sistemas de transporte: um estudo de caso em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The analysis of accessibility for pedestrians near transport integration stations is essential to guarantee equality of rights and opportunities. Given this context, it is considered important to carry out a study of the difficulties faced, proposing strategies to improve accessibility and expand the areas covered by public transport facilities. It's crucial to consider Brazilian society's evaluation of public transport and discuss the limitations of transportation systems in terms of infrastructure and urban planning, highlighting the need for considering social and economic issues for efficient urban mobility. Integration station projects are sometimes executed focusing only on the circulation plans of the vehicles operating within the systems, neglecting passengers and their needs for walking or wheelchair mobility. These stations serve to physically and fareintegrate different types of public transportation systems to facilitate the exchange between systems in an agile and organized manner, where the system user can gain efficiency, time, and quality in one or more sections of the trip, justifying the transfer and segmentation of the journey. The methodology employed in this work consists of analyzing the accessibility to some integration stations in Belo Horizonte, using geographical characteristics as criteria, reaching the coverage areas of the stations. As a result, there is a significant difference when comparing the coverage areas of stations with pedestrian crossings to those accessed by footbridges, with the former being, on average, three times larger. After simulations of replacing footbridges with pedestrian crossings, there is an average increase of 561% in coverage area. It concludes that it is necessary to improve the maximum walking criteria adopted by managing bodies, needing to evolve to establish shorter limit distances. Finally, the stations analyzed in this dissertation have a level of accessibility far below their potential, caused by pedestrian accesses with long walking stretches in structures designed to prioritize individual transport over collective transport.