Inclusive accessibility: Analyzing socio-economic disparities in perceived accessibility

New paper!  Kar, A., Xiao, N., Miller, H.J. and Le, H.T.K. “Inclusive accessibility: Analyzing socio-economic disparities in perceived accessibility,” Computers, Environment and Urban Systems,  114, 102202

Highlights

  • Inclusive access considers both physical and perceptual barriers to travel.
  • Perceptions of safety and comfort vary with people’s socio-economic statuses.
  • Existing infrastructure and services yield unequal access across communities.
  • High-income white populations experience transportation privileges over others.
  • Low-income communities with greater risk exposures perceive higher mobility barriers.

Abstract

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.

 

Journal of Geographical Systems 2023 Best Paper Award

Totally chuffed that our paper on “realizable accessibility” has been selected by the Journal of Geographical Systems for the 2023 JGS Best Paper Award:

Movement analytics for sustainable mobility

New paper: Miller, H.J. (2020) “Movement analytics for sustainable mobility.Journal of Spatial Information Science, 20, 115-123.

Invited essay for 10th anniversary issue

Abstract: Mobility is central to urbanity, and urbanity is central to our common future as the world’s population crowds into urban areas. This is creating a global urban mobility crisis due to the unsustainability of our 20th century transportation systems for an urban world. Fortunately, the science and planning of urban mobility is transforming away from infrastructure as the solution towards a sustainable mobility paradigm that manages rather than encourages travel, diminishes mobility and accessibility inequities, and reduces the harms of mobility to people and environments. In this essay, I discuss the contributions over the past decade of movement analytics to sustainable mobility science and planning. I also highlight two major challenges to sustainable mobility that should be addressed over the next decade.

Keywords: movement analytics, mobility science, animal movement ecology, sustainable mobility, urbanity