Abstract Smart card data (SCD) from Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) systems provide fine-grained insights into urban mobility rhythms. Yet most existing studies focus on static ridership, with limited attention to the relationship between station-level travel rhythms and the surrounding built environment. This study develops a spatiotemporal and data-driven framework to classify urban rail transit (URT) stations and examine their land-use determinants. Using two weeks of AFC data from 128 stations in Nanjing, China, a two-stage approach is implemented. First, a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is applied to cluster stations based on weekday ridership profiles, yielding six distinct categories: residential oriented, employment oriented, hub comprehensive, spatial mismatched, predominantly residential mixed use, and predominantly employment mixed use. These categories reveal a clear transition from mixed and hub functions in the city center to residential-dominated stations in suburban areas. Second, a Random Parameter Logit (RPL) model is employed to assess the influence of socio-demographic, land-use, and amenity variables, capturing heterogeneity more effectively than the conventional Multinomial Logit (MNL) model. Results highlight the decisive roles of population density, housing prices, and employment land in shaping employment- and hub-oriented stations, while community-oriented facilities, such as healthcare and daily services, exert stronger effects on residential-oriented stations. These findings enrich theoretical understanding of station heterogeneity and provide empirical evidence for transit-oriented development (TOD), land-use coordination, and multimodal integration. The proposed framework is transferable to other rapidly urbanizing cities, offering practical guidance for building efficient and sustainable URT systems.
Wang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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