| dc.description.abstract | Striving to reflect on the significance and comprehensiveness of access applications, we collected 19 chapters covering access research in seven main categories to illustrate the state-of-the-art of access applications along distinct dimensions of transport studies.
Our chapters cover access research at the international, national, metropolitan, and city levels. American cities are studied in chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 11, chapter 14, chapter 16, chapter 18, and chapter 19. International cases are assessed and compared in chapter 2 and chapter 17, while chapter 9 examines Munich, Germany and chapter 13 analyzes Jakarta, Indonesia.
Chapters are grouped into seven informal and overlapping categories:
Equity and social justice:
In chapter 2, Santos and Boisjoly discuss a series of case studies that display a growing concern for transport equity. They suggest that professionals and policymakers can adopt access-based approaches to foster social inclusion through equitable transport policies. In chapter 3, Palmateer and Levinson evaluate potential measures of distributive justice based on the access to jobs provided by various modes and offer recommendations for appropriate use of each measure. In chapter 4, Borowski, Ermagun, and Levinson explore the relation between transit-based job access and minority races and ethnicities, low- and middle-income households, and carless households at the block group level for the 50 most populated metropolitan areas in the United States. The analyses show that access is unevenly distributed across metropolitan regions across the US when considering various socio-demographic populations. Different metropolitan regions provide different levels of access for all investigated socio-demographic categories, whether considering racial minorities, levels of income, or car ownership.
Resilience and crisis:
In chapter 5, DeWeese, Manaugh, and El-Geneidy show how access can be used as a rapid diagnostic tool to assess the potential impacts of public transport service adjustments during a public health crisis. In chapter 6, Ghorbanzadeh, Kim, Ozguven, and Horner assess the spatial access of US census population block groups to congregate and non-congregate shelters in Northwest Florida. They argue that many areas in Northwest Florida have lower access to non-congregate shelters compared to congregate shelters.
Active transport:
In chapter 7, Murphy, Owen, and Levinson predict pedestrian activity using scalable and transferable predictive variables. They show that access to jobs by walking and transit, automobile traffic, and specific economic job categories (Education, Finance) are significant predictors of increased pedestrian traffic. In contrast, access to other economic job categories (Management, Utilities) significantly predict decreased pedestrian traffic. In chapter 8, Schoner and Levinson study people’s navigation from place to place using the Nice Ride Minnesota bikeshare system in Minneapolis. The results indicate people prefer to use stations that do not require long detours out of the way to access. However, commuters and non-work travelers differ in how they value the walking portion of their trip and what station amenities and neighborhood features increase a station’s utility. In chapter 9, Duran-Rodas, Nichols, and Büttner conducted a spatial fairness assessment to analyze which social groups are favored with active access to Urban E-commerce Infrastructure (UEI) in Munich and claim that e-commerce infrastructure benefits the cosmopolitan population, regardless of social status.
Public transport:
In chapter 10, Zeng, Song, and Chen present methods and procedures to evaluate grocery store spatio-temporal access considering coupled constraints of transit schedules and store opening hours. The findings suggest that decision-makers need to consider the variations in access levels across different spatial locations, times of the day, and social groups within various living-built environments. In chapter 11, Guthrie and Fan explore the ability of transit systems in regions to provide post-secondary education and job placement services destinations for marginalized workers. Their results provide compelling evidence for the social equity benefits of regional transit investments and the importance of integrated transit, land use, and regional public service planning.
Auto travel:
In chapter 12, Huang and Levinson examine the impact of land use around the home on vehicle trip generation and identify the correlation of trips made by the same individual in the trip generation models. The results indicate that although access around the home is not found to have statistically significant effects on non-work vehicle trips, the diversity of services within 10 to 15 minutes and 15 to 20 minutes from home can help reduce the number of non-work vehicle trips. In chapter 13, Andani, Paix, Rachmat, Syabri, and Geurs describe an evaluation of the job access and spatial equity impacts of the Cipularang toll road in the Jakarta – Bandung corridor in Indonesia. The analysis reveals that the construction of the toll road has reduced travel time in the whole region by 13%, and potential job access increased by 5%.
System performance:
In chapter 14, Ermagun and Levinson disentangle the impacts of financial and physical dimensions of transit service operators on net transit access. The results indicate that using the same operating expenses for both bus and train services, the bus system provides roughly 6 times more access than the train system. The bus system also operates 4 times more efficiently than the train system, providing access with the same frequency. In chapter 15, Iacono, Cao, Cui, and Levinson investigate the relation between urban access and firm agglomeration, as reflected in patterns of employment densities. They argue that urbanization effects tend to overshadow those of localization effects. These effects vary by sector, with many service-based sectors showing a stronger propensity to agglomerate than manufacturing and several “basic” sectors like agriculture, mining, and utilities. In chapter 16, Janatabadi, Tajik, and Ermagun study the spatial and temporal disparity of modal access to employment in Chicago and its nine neighborhoods. The findings alert urban planners and policymakers on the effects of travel time and space on access analysis. They also explain how inaccurate perceptions of transit performance prevent the development of an effective and equitable transit system.
Project evaluation:
In chapter 17, Stewart and Byrd evaluate how interactive tools for calculating and visualizing indicators of access to opportunities can facilitate more integrated metropolitan planning. In chapter 18, Palmateer, Ermagun, Owen, and Levinson examine the importance of service area definition when utilizing access-based evaluation in transit projects. The results indicate that the choice of transit service areas significantly impacts the value of absolute access measures. In chapter 19, Palmateer, Owen, and Ermagun use the access-based evaluation method to unpack the interaction effect of transit-oriented development and a new transit hub using the San Francisco Transbay Transit Center Development Plan project. This indicates that in areas where there already is transit service, the development of land near the transit service can have a greater impact on access levels than the improvement of connections between transit services. The book ends in chapter 20 with a review by Jin, Cheng, and Witlox of how virtual access interacts with physical access and how the interaction affects travel-access relations in the future. | en_AU |
