Comparaisons nationales et internationales: une analyse statistique

This paper is a part of a more general research, aiming to analyze and to compare land use patterns and transportation patterns of four specific railway lines, whose main stations are Bruxelles, Milan, Paris and Washington. In the analysis of the relationships between such patterns in the station areas, it would be interesting to find some similarity among stations, both at national and at international level. This objective is achieved by performing a Principal Component Analysis (PCA), separately for each of the railway lines, and an overall one that takes into account all the stations at once. Some interesting results emerge from this analysis, especially towards the ‘node-place’ analysis performed in other contributions of the research. In particular, railway stations show national specific characteristics: the French stations show higher values for characteristics that can be interpreted as node characteristics and lower values for those that can be interpreted as place characteristics; for the Italian railway stations it is the opposite, while the Belgian stations show lower values for both kinds of characteristics. Furthermore, referring to the identification of the characteristics at the node level and at the place level, it emerges that while train number, parking number and boarded ratio contribute to identify the node factor in each analysis, tpl shows a relevant link with a factor only in the French and in the global cases; it could depend on the inadequacy of available data. On the other side, referring to the place status, outfl ow ratio and not residential building ratio showed an unclear behaviour, being appeared linked also with node status at least for one separate analysis. Certainly a bigger effort should be made in collecting data, to reach more uniformity in both reference periods and sources.