Transport Reviews

ISSN: 0144-1647 (Print) 1464-5327 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/ttrv20

Accessibility: measurement and application in

transportation planning

Eric J. Miller

To cite this article: Eric J. Miller (2018) Accessibility: measurement and

application in transportation planning, Transport Reviews, 38:5, 551-555, DOI:
10.1080/01441647.2018.1492778

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2018.1492778

Published online: 06 Jul 2018.

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TRANSPORT REVIEWS
2018, VOL. 38, NO. 5, 551–555
https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2018.1492778

EDITORIAL

Accessibility: measurement and application in transportation

planning

The primary role of a transportation system is to provide people and businesses with access to
other people and businesses so that they can physically engage in spatially and temporally dis-
tributed activities of all kinds (social, economic, etc.), and so that they can physically exchange
information, goods and services. Given this fundamental relationship between transportation
and accessibility, it is surprising that accessibility remains a rather illusive concept in transpor-
tation planning and modelling, with a number of issues still existing concerning its definition,
measurement and, most importantly, usage in practical applications.
Starting from first principles, there is arguably general, axiomatic agreement that
accessibility:

. Varies from point to point in space.

. Is activity (trip purpose) specific.
. Combines the concept of travel impedance (i.e., the ease/difficulty to reach or interact with
different points in space) with that of attractiveness and/or magnitude of opportunities (i.e.,
the desirability of/opportunities for interaction at a given point).
. Is a measure of the potential to interact. Mobility, on the other hand, is the realisation of this
potential in terms of actual travel through the transportation system.
. Involves the integration or summation over the space of opportunities, weighted by the ease
of interaction. If there are many attractive stores near my home, my accessibility for shop-
ping clearly is higher than if there only a limited number of stores available that are of
poor quality and/or located very far away.
. Given the needs/wants-based nature of travel, the concept of ‘interaction potential’ (i.e.,
accessibility) is clearly tied closely to that of travel demand, as well as the location
choices of households and firms.

Translating these intuitive but loose properties into concrete measures of accessibility
requires a number of further assumptions. The first involves defining how to measure how
‘near’ or ‘far’ one point is from another and what the ‘cost’ of travel from one point to
another is. Many accessibility measures simply use distance (either straight-line or network
path-based, with the latter being generally preferable) as the metric. For walk accessibilities,
distance is a suitable measure since it readily maps into travel time and is also a direct
measure of the level of effort involved in accessing a given point. Otherwise, however,
travel time is generally a much better measure of perceived impedance than distance.
Travel time for any trip, however, depends on both the mode of travel used and the time
of day when the trip is made. Thus, travel time-based measures of access (and hence acces-
sibility) must either be mode-based or else ‘integrate over’ the potential to travel by the
various modes available for a given trip in an appropriate manner. Further, to the extent
that travel times by both auto and transit vary by time of day, this means that accessibility
also varies within and across days.

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

552 EDITORIAL

Travel time is also a transportation policy-sensitive variable since it will change in response
to changes in both the demand and supply sides of the system; whereas distance-based
measures generally will only change in response to changes in the attraction variable levels
in the measure.
Similarly, many factors might influence the attractiveness of a given location for a given
activity. Conventional factors that are often used include location ‘size’ measures (floorspace,
number of employees, population, etc.), but a wider variety of variables is clearly conceivable.
A major practical challenge, however, in virtually all operational accessibility measures is the
use of overly simplistic and aggregate ‘size’ measures as very crude measures of the actual
attractiveness of a given location for a given activity. This challenge in measuring attractiveness
is compounded in any practical application by the inescapable significant heterogeneity that
exists in human activities and the associated attributes of activity locations. ‘Shopping’ is
often an activity episode/trip purpose category for which we may wish to compute an acces-
sibility measure. But shopping is an extremely heterogeneous activity, encompassing every-
thing from picking up a litre of milk at the local ‘corner store’ to buying major durables such
as cars, furniture, etc. How does one represent location attractiveness appropriately in the
face of such variation in activities? Additional categorisation of activity/trip types helps, of
course, but there are inevitable practical limits to achievable levels of detail.
Further, perception and evaluation (weighting) of impedance and attraction factors vary
from agent to agent, depending on the agent’s cognitive abilities, tastes/preferences, personal
experiences and personal (and household) constraints. The ability of people to exploit a given
physical context of access and attraction will also vary depending on their financial, cognitive
and physical capabilities. As obvious examples, persons without cars and persons with physical
and mental disabilities all generally have quite different accessibilities (potential for inter-
actions) than persons who do not face these same challenges. Therefore, accessibility ulti-
mately varies among persons as a function of both their individual preferences and capabilities.
Thus, the ‘simple’ notion of accessibility becomes surprisingly difficult to operationalise. In
particular, if we believe that travel time is the appropriate measure of access, this leads to a
veritable ‘hyperspace’ of accessibilities varying from person to person by mode, purpose and
time of day, in addition to spatially. Note that not only does this pose significant analytic chal-
lenges in terms of computing myriad accessibilities, it creates serious challenges to accessibil-
ity-based policy-making, as is discussed further below.
These conceptual challenges, of course, have not stopped analysts from asserting and con-
structing a wide variety of accessibility measures for a wide variety of applications. Four of the
most commonly used measures in the literature are (Handy & Niemeier, 1997; Kwan, 1998)

1. Distance (or perhaps time by mode M) to the nearest subway stop, freeway interchange,
school, hospital, etc.
2. Cumulative opportunities within an access distance or time threshold (isochrone method).
3. Gravity/entropy model denominators (‘Hanson’s measure’; Hansen, 1959).
4. Expected maximum random utility-based measures (e.g., logit model ‘logsums’; Ben-Akiva
and Leman, 1985).

Detailed discussion of the relative merits or appropriate uses for these four approaches is not
feasible in this editorial. The only point that will be made is that the first three are simply
asserted measures that have no solid basis in theory. Their usage is based on pragmatic
grounds that they: (1) are generally consistent with the accessibility axioms; (2) are easy to
compute and (3) (may) generate statistically significant and plausible parameter values in
location choice models, etc. Logit logsum type measures have some theoretical foundation
 TRANSPORT REVIEWS 553

in random utility theory, given that the logsum expected maximum utility measure can be
interpreted as a measure of consumer surplus, and that ‘it seems reasonable’, therefore, to
assert that accessibility is defined as this consumer surplus term. Use of such logsum terms
to ‘roll up’ into, for example, logit residential location choice models is also a practically con-
venient approach in many models.
This lack of a compelling, robust theoretical foundation for measuring accessibility results in
many conceptual and practical problems in using accessibility in transportation planning and
policy analysis. Taking worker access to employment opportunities as a common accessibility
measure of policy interest, examples of issues include the following.
First, there is no objective, normative standard for what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘acceptable’
accessibility. My employment accessibility may be 20% below the average accessibility for
people in my occupation group in my city, but the value of this average accessibility (and
hence the value of my 20% deficit) is difficult to establish. Using an isochrone measure, for
example, what is the value of access to one more job within a 30-minute threshold – either
to me individually or to society as a whole? Further, this average accessibility is the emergent
outcome of the current transportation system and the current distribution of workers and jobs,
will change over time and has no intrinsic meaning except as a relative, within-group bench-
mark at one point in time. Are accessibilities in a given urban region getting better or worse
over time? Does one urban region have better average accessibility than another? How
should governments set standards for ‘minimum acceptable’ accessibility levels? How much
money should be allocated to improving accessibility (for whom, where, in what way)?
Second, the subjective (person-based) nature of most accessibility measures makes com-
parison of accessibility levels across groups difficult. If I have a lower accessibility score
based on my tastes and preferences (perhaps defined on the basis of my occupation group
and income) than you do based on yours, can a policy-maker actually assess my ‘need’ relative
to yours for more accessibility?
Third, as noted above, all accessibility measures are ad hoc in derivation to various degrees.
This results in different measures and specifications being used in different studies and urban
regions, making ‘learning’ over time and across applications concerning what are ‘best’ specifi-
cations difficult. Reasonable correlations between observed location and travel choices and an
accessibility measure may be achieved, but these usually do not provide strong ‘hypothesis
tests’ of the assumed specifications. Isochrone-based measures are particularly arbitrary and
behaviourally suspect (Xi, et al., 2018), but gravity/logit model-based measures have their
own issues, as discussed below.
Fourth, all conventional accessibility measures are static/cross-sectional in nature, based on
a snapshot in time of population and employment distributions and associated transportation
service levels at that point in time. The estimation of model parameters from cross-sectional
data inherently assumes a system at equilibrium (which the entropy formulation underlying
both gravity-based and logit-based measures makes clear). But if residential and labour
markets are not ever in equilibrium (which very arguably is the case) how can we impute
the role that accessibility plays in housing and employment location decisions, among
others, from cross-sectional models? A specific example of this concern is residential location
choice models, which typically are estimated from cross-sectional data and then applied in a
quasi-dynamic integrated transport – land use model system. ‘Integration’ usually occurs
through a logsum accessibility term feedback from the travel demand model to the land
use model. But does this logsum, derived from modelling an arbitrary ‘typical’ day actually
reflect the way in which households assess their accessibility and the trade-offs between acces-
sibility and the many other factors affecting their long-term location choices?
554 EDITORIAL

Fifth, the relationship between accessibility and land value is not as well established as is
needed for rational transportation infrastructure investment and urban planning. Spatial econ-
omic theory tells us that our location choices should be the outcome of trade-offs between
different levels of accessibility and other amenities/considerations in residential and firm
location choices and building stock development decisions, in addition to activity/travel
location choices. The value of land and buildings (their ‘bid rents’) should reflect these
trade-offs and the competition among agents to locate at points of greater or lesser transpor-
tation advantage (accessibility) (Alonso, 1964). Despite this theory, and despite decades of
analysis and modelling activity, we generally lack robust relationships between accessibility
and land value that can be confidently used in policy analysis. This is a particularly important
gap for transit infrastructure investment decisions, whose benefit–cost evaluations often criti-
cally hinge on the land development and land value increases expected from such major
investments.
Further, the role that accessibility plays in the associated issue of agglomeration economies
and processes is, again, assumed in economic theory, but not as explicitly elaborated as one
needs to truly understand the feedback processes at work. The emerging ‘science of cities’,
and, in particular, explanation of the empirically observed ‘scaling’ of city inputs and outputs
is largely based on assumptions of increasing agglomeration effects (tied to social and physical
network interactions) with growth in city size (West, 2017). As with so many aspects of the
accessibility discussion, this assertion is plausible, but not yet well demonstrated.
Finally, the complexity of the concept and its measures makes accessibility very difficult for
the public, politicians and even many planners to understand and use. The simpler ‘distance to
the closest transit stop’ and ‘number of jobs within a 30-minute drive are intuitively under-
standable, but often theoretically dubious’. Model-based measures improve upon many of
the failings of the simpler measures, but often generate a massive amount of data that are
difficult to digest, while the methods themselves are generally incomprehensible to the
non-modeller.
If accessibility is to ‘take its rightful place’ as a central concept in transportation planning, we
need to, first, firm up and standardise our theoretical concepts and operational methods, and,
second, find much better ways to communicate the usefulness of these concepts and measures
in clear, compelling and credible ways to the public and decision-makers. The latter can be
addressed in part through well designed visualisation tools (including interactive displays
which allow people to explore the impacts on their neighbourhood accessibilities of various
transportation policies) and thoughtful, non-technical, context-sensitive ‘story-telling’ that
explains the way in which transportation policies might (or might not, in the case of poorly con-
ceived policies) improve a neighbourhood’s accessibility (and, hence, opportunities for
improved quality of life).
The much more challenging problem, however, is to establish useful, robust standards for
‘acceptable’ levels of accessibility and methods for valuing the benefits of accessibility. In trans-
portation planning, we are used to computing travel time changes due to infrastructure invest-
ment and other policies and to attaching an economic value to these changes via value of time
calculations. This represents a mobility benefit due to increased efficiency in movement that
‘saves time’ that can then be used productively in other ways. We do not currently have a com-
parable, standard way of measuring the accessibility benefit of the opportunity or potential to
interact at various levels of access. Defining accessibility in terms of consumer surplus is con-
ceptually very attractive, since it associates accessibility with a very well established measure of
social welfare/benefit. It also facilitates monetisation of accessibility, which can be useful for
benefit–cost evaluations. Significant improvement in our representations of the actual attrac-
tiveness of alternative locations and in our specifications of location choice sets, and extensions
 TRANSPORT REVIEWS 555

to include a wider range of activities and services (education, health care, etc.) are all required if
this approach is to be broadly useful in transportation planning and decision-making.

References
Alonso, W. (1964). Location and land use. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ben-Akiva, M., & Lerman, S. R. (1985). Discrete choice analysis: Theory and application to predict travel demand.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Handy, S. L., & Niemeier, D. A. (1997). Measuring accessibility: An exploration of issues and alternatives.
Environmental Planning A, 29(7), 117501184.
Hansen, S. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76.
Kwan, M.-P. (1998). Space-time and integral measures of individual accessibility: A comparative analysis using a
point-based framework. Geographical Analysis, 30(3), 1910216.
West, G. (2017). Scale: The universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities,
economies, and companies. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Xi, Y., Miller, E. J., & Saxe, S. (2018). Exploring the impact of different cut-off times on isochrone measurements of
accessibility. Transportation Research Records, Journal of the Transportation Research Board, forthcoming.

Eric J. Miller
Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering, Transportation Research Institute, University of Toronto,
Toronto, ON, Canada
miller@ecf.utoronto.ca