Development of an urban accessibility index: formulations, aggregation, and application

摘要: In the face of rising traffic volume, decreasing open space, increasing air pollution, and reduced funding, transportation planners are looking for responsive and accurate ways to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative transportation projects. In order to address these concerns, transportation planners are looking to measures that go beyond the traditional category of mobility measures. Mobility measures concentrate on the ease of movement. Some of the measures under consideration attempt to evaluate the transportation and land use system from the user’s perspective. Measures that include information about both transportation and land use falls into the general category of accessibility measures. These measures assess the ease of interaction and go beyond mobility measures in their ability to represent both land use and the transportation system aspects of an area.The accessibility measure presented here is intended to be used in statewide transportation planning, as well as other planning efforts, for two specific purposes. First, as a measure of the current conditions in an area. Second, as an alternate method to evaluate conditions before and after project implementation. While many accessibility measures provide information at a disaggregate level (at a particular time of day for a particular mode and trip purpose), a key innovation in the work presented here is the ability to aggregate over any combination of four dimensions. The four dimensions are: trip purpose, mode, time-of-day, and spatial level. For several decades now, accessibility has been the focus of literature in various fields of study. This undoubtedly reflects the different study …