The accessibility of major centres to the bus transport services in Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria

The central aim of this study is to find out the level of accessibility of different parts of Enugu to the mass:.t~ansit bus network meas'l'.lred in terms of shortest bus route distance and bus travel-tim~ and to relate the level of accessibility to the level of bus services. The level of bus ·services was defined in terms of bus passenger waiting time, bus frequency arrival and passenger walking distance to the nearest bus step. The data collected between 1994 and 1995, were based on field observations, government documents and personal interviews. In this thesis, a classification of 31 sampled settlementsj called major centres, was first developed based on population and type of land-uses such as residential, employment 9 market and educational land-uses. By means of graph theory, the ·complex network ef mass ..... transit .bUQ routes was abstracted into a set of nodes and edges which. enabled us to construct indices of connectivity and relative accessibility of the major centres on the network. The connectivity indices reveal that the mass:··twnsit bus routes in Enugu have very low connectivity. Similarly, the indices of nodal (major centre) accessibility based on shortest bus route distance show that there exists a central core of highly accessible centres to mass transit bus network which constrasts with peripheral centres of