Inclusive accessibility: Analyzing socio-economic disparities in perceived accessibility

Existing accessibility measures mainly focus on the physical limitations of travel and ignore travelers’ perceptions, behavior, and socio-economic differences. By integrating approaches in time geography and travel behavior, this study introduces a bottom-up inclusive accessibility concept that aggregates individual-level travel perceptions across socio-economic groups to evaluate their multimodal access to opportunities. We classify accessibility constraints into hard constraints (physical space-time limitations to travel) and soft constraints (perceptual factors influencing travel, such as safety perceptions, comfort, and willingness to travel). We categorize travelers into 12 mutually exclusive socio-economic groups from a mobility survey dataset of 477 travelers. We apply a support vector regressor-based ensemble algorithm to estimate network-level walking perception scores as soft constraints for each social group. We derive group-specific inclusive accessibility measures that consider space-time limitations from transit and sidewalk networks as hard constraints and minimize the group-specific soft constraint to a certain threshold. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of group-specific inclusive accessibility by comparing it with the classic access measure. Our study provides scientific evidence on how people of varying socio-economic statuses perceive the same travel environment differently. We find that socio-economically disadvantaged communities experience higher mobility barriers and lower accessibility while walking and using transit in Columbus, OH. Our study demonstrates a transition from person- to place-based accessibility measures by sequentially quantifying mobility perceptions for individual travelers and aggregating them by social groups for a large geographic scale, making this approach suitable for equity-oriented need-specific transportation planning.