Framework Development for Locating Railway Passenger Stations with the use of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and Urban Regeneration Approaches.

Due to the advantages such as the ability to carry a large number of passengers and cargo, environmental protection, low energy consumption, and tourist attractions, railway transportation has become one of the best transportation systems types, Thus, the existence of suitable and accessible stations is one of the requirements that leads to better performance and plays a significant role in the economic, social, political, and cultural development of the region. In order to realize this paper goal based on compiling the framework and criteria for the location of railway passenger stations in the country, it first reviews and studies the documents, theoretical bases, approaches and effective literature in railway passenger stations locations. Therefore, by examining development approaches based on public transportation and urban regeneration, as well as reviewing and analyzing the experiences of locating railway stations inside and outside the country, the research framework including goals, criteria, and sub-criteria in location is developed. In this section, four major criteria including access, development, technical and economic requirements, and environmental harmony were explained. Then, considering the selection of Birjand city as a case study, the compliance of the criteria with the case study was investigated. Through the next step, in order to achieve the relationship between factors and criteria, the opinions of experts related to the research topic were used in the form of a questionnaire following the Hierarchical Analytical Process (AHP). To gather necessary data for the determination of weights for site selection criteria, managers and experts' opinions who are the members of the railway station site selection committee in Iran, have been used. The results of this analysis showed that the criterion of environmental harmony with 43/6% impact is the most important criterion for locating passenger railway stations. After that, technical and economic criteria with 26% and accessibility with 21/8% are respectively the most important. Also, the development criterion with a weight of 8/6% is less important than the mentioned criteria. Next, the optimal location of the Birjand station was determined using Geographic Information System (GIS). Finally, by joining the layers obtained from measuring each of the effective factors in the site selection process using the Raster Calculator command in the Geographic Information System and having the weight and importance coefficient of each of the factors, the final desirability of each of the primary options compared to each other is revealed. The results show that station E is evaluated as the most optimal location for the Birjand railway passenger station. After that, the station BCD can be considered as a relatively favorable place for establishing the mentioned station. Unlike many other articles in the field of site selection, this paper used innovative solutions in its procedure regarding the study's goal, such as utilizing travel time to determine the desirability of possible stations in the accessibility criterion. However, geographical differences and specific conditions of each location may lead to the addition or subtraction of some other criteria to the items proposed in this paper.