Spatial Accessibility to Shopping Malls in Nanjing,China: Comparative Analysis with Multiple Transportation Modes

This study attempts to evaluate the rationality of the spatial layout of shopping malls and identify the urban area with poor shopping mall accessibility, as well as to provide a reference and assist decision-making for planning. Using the case of Nanjing, China, this study developed a method to evaluate the accessibility of shopping malls by three transport modes(car traffic, public transit, and bicycle). Specially, we divide the urban space into a regular hexagonal grid and harvest the total travel time from each of 7204 hexagon centroids to each of 129 shopping malls using the Baidu Internet map. The door-to-door travel time approach is used to evaluate all travel stages(walking, waiting, transfer, and transportation) based on travel time calculations. We further divide the shopping malls into two levels(super-regional and regional) based on the Dianping App's information and develop the indicator of accessibility to shopping malls: the number of shopping malls within tolerance time thresholds and apply the closest facility and cumulative opportunities methods to measure accessibility scores. The results show that the accessibility estimations vary greatly with transport modes. The accessibility of shopping malls presents a concentric ring trend centered on the city center under the car traffic and bicycle modes. And public transit accessibility tends to axially extend due to the topology of bus routes and metro lines. In particular, we observe that the accessibility of shopping malls in Nanjing has an uneven spatial distribution pattern, with high accessibility values in the central urban areas and lots of underserved areas in urban fringe regions. Based on the accessibility measurements, we finally map the poor accessibility area and propose corresponding implications for urban planning.