Twenty years of accessibility improvements. The case of the Spanish motorway building programme

This paper presents an exploratory spatial data analysis of accessibility impacts of a large-scale national motorway building programme. Accessibility is calculated for Spanish municipalities from 1980 to 2000 using two indicators: motorway network access and market potential accessibility. The average distance from municipalities to their nearest motorway has been reduced markedly over this period. Market potential accessibility maps show that there have been gains in all locations, but some of the highest gains occurred in some of the more peripheral regions. A review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the economic impacts of transport investments indicates important implications for regional development.     

Impact of new motorway on housing prices in rural North-East Slovenia

The literature generally agrees that improved accessibility has a positive effect on housing values. The motorway constructions in north-eastern Slovenia, completed between 2002 and 2018, significantly improved the accessibility of less developed areas. In this article, we examine how the new motorway has affected the housing values in the mostly rural north-eastern part of Slovenia. We analysed the distance decay effect of amenities and disamenities of motorway links and ramps as well as bus stops, train stations, and railway links on housing prices. In addition to the transport infrastructure variables, we analysed numerous other structural and environmental variables. We estimated three different spatial hedonic regression models: the spatial autoregression model, the spatial error model, and the spatial autocorrelation model.The results indicate that none of proximities to the bus stop, train station, or motorway link have had a significant effect on housing value. However, the rail track proximity exhibited a significant negative association with price. Furthermore, the effect of distance to the nearest motorway ramp on housing value is significant: it is stronger for closer distances (i.e. starting from 500 m) and decreases up to 6 km, while the effect of distances below 500 m is insignificant. Our results also show that bigger dwellings, more rooms, and the presence of a balcony, elevator, central auto heating system, new installation, and air conditioning as well as an apartment in a single house, are associated with a higher housing price. On the contrary, selling the dwellings together with a parking place and basement reduced the average price of the housing property. Comparing our results to the literature, we proved our hypothesis that the negative effect of a motorway is less pronounced in rural areas compared to urban areas and that the positive effect of accessibility is stronger in rural areas and extends over a wider geographical area.     

The impact of the great recession on Irish air travel: An intermodal accessibility analysis

This paper quantifies the changes in accessibility at small area scale arising from the combined effects of dramatic air traffic declines and a greatly expanded motorway network in Ireland during the period of the great recession. The subsequent policy decisions by government are assessed in light of the intermodal accessibility changes identified. The Irish Government engaged in an extensive motorway construction programme throughout the 2000s, greatly increasing the overall length of the inter-urban motorway network. The essential air transport services programme put in place in the 1990s to guarantee a minimum level of air access to disadvantaged regions was significantly reduced at the end of the 2008–2011 period, with only two of the six regional airports continuing to have any form of subsidised public service obligation for the period 2011–2014. In this study, small area datasets are used to measure the net impact of these changes on air transport accessibility in Ireland and the potential spatial inequalities that arise as a result of these changes. An inter-modal accessibility approach is used where the physical characteristics of the road transport network to airports and the network structure characteristics of the air transport system are taken into account to evaluate the levels of air transport accessibility at the small-area district level. Results from the analysis show that the improved surface access to the larger Irish airports (Dublin and Belfast) has enhanced the range of European and global locations directly accessible by air for many communities in Ireland. The net effect of these changes has been to concentrate air traffic at the largest Irish airports.     

Estimating the influence of crowding and travel time variability on accessibility to jobs in a large public transport network using smart card big data

Accessibility metrics are gaining momentum in public transportation planning and policy-making. However, critical user experience issues such as crowding discomfort and travel time unreliability are still not considered in those accessibility indicators. This paper aims to apply a methodology to build spatiotemporal crowding data and estimate travel time variability in a congested public transport network to improve accessibility calculations. It relies on using multiple big data sources available in most transit systems such as smart card and automatic vehicle location (AVL) data. São Paulo, Brazil, is used as a case study to show the impact of crowding and travel time variability on accessibility to jobs. Our results evidence a population-weighted average reduction of 56.8% in accessibility to jobs in a regular workday morning peak due to crowding discomfort, as well as reductions of 6.2% due to travel time unreliability and 59.2% when both are combined. The findings of this study can be of invaluable help to public transport planners and policymakers, as they show the importance of including both aspects in accessibility indicators for better decision making. Despite some limitations due to data quality and consistency throughout the study period, the proposed approach offers a new way to leverage big data in public transport to enhance policy decisions.     

Assessing High-Speed Rail’s impacts on land cover change in large urban areas based on spatial mixed logit methods: a case study of Madrid Atocha railway station from 1990 to 2006

This paper proposes an accessibility-based spatial mixed logit (SML) model with panel data structure to examine the impacts of High-Speed Rail (HSR) on land cover change in large urban areas. Using data between 1990 and 2006, impacts of the Spanish HSR on Madrid’s Atocha railway station influence area – a 20 km radius buffer centred on the station – were investigated. To model the HSR impacts, besides socioeconomic variables, the development of both local and regional transportation networks with corresponding accessibility improvement is also taken into account to segregate the impacts of land-cover change brought by different sources of accessibility measures. In this study, two SML models are used: one incorporates regional accessibility indicators as a base model, and the other does not, acting as a control model. The model estimation results reveal that the reduction of the local and regional weighted travel average time has positive impacts on the Atocha station catchment area’s urbanised land-cover rates. Although the base and control models both achieve high goodness-of-fit values, the base model that considers regional accessibility reveals a better goodness-of-fit statistic and is more robust than the control model. It is concluded that the improvement of regional accessibility due to the arrival of HSR at Atocha station plays an essential role in the urbanisation of land cover changes in the study area.     

Mapping accessibility in Belgium: a tool for land-use and transport planning?

This paper compares the spatial structure of car accessibility to towns and to railway stations during peak and off-peak hours in Belgium for the country’s 2616 municipalities. A clustering method is applied. It is shown that in a highly urbanised country, the situation is far from being spatially equitable in terms of accessibility, and some areas are more favoured than others. Congestion increases spatial inequalities, differently according to absolute or relative measures of change. By means of examples, this paper shows that even simple accessibility indicators could be useful to support decisions taken by planners and politicians (e.g. as regards the development of residential, industrial and business park areas). Maps indicate the spatial inequalities in terms of accessibility to urban centres and transport nodes, and the impact of congestion on these inequalities. The absolute and relative time losses due to congestion affect different areas in different ways. The location of new developments further increases the congestion problem and the spatial disparities. This paper also insists on the caution that should be adopted when measuring and interpreting “accessibility”, its measurements, its inputs, its temporal changes in absolute and relative terms as well as the need for spatially disaggregated data.     

Location of logistics companies: a stated preference study to disentangle the impact of accessibility

Due to the globalization and the fragmentation of industrial production processes, the logistics sector, organizing the linkages between different production plants and the market, is growing fast. This results in an increasing demand for suitable new business locations. Previous research has indicated that accessibility is a key factor in the location decision making process. Though the literature on this subject is extensive, little research has been done to quantify the impact of the different dimensions of accessibility on the location decision process of logistics companies. This paper aims to fill this void in the literature by means of a revealed preference study (using a Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis) and a stated preference study (using a designed discrete choice experiment) in Flanders (Belgium). The results of the revealed preference study served as input to the design of the choice situations in the stated preference study. In the stated preference study, the respondents were confronted with a series of choice situations described by means of accessibility variables as well as land rent information. An analysis of the resulting data by means of discrete choice modeling revealed that land rent is the most important factor in the location choice of logistics companies in Flanders. Access to a port is the second most important factor, followed by access to a motorway, the location in a business park and an inland navigation terminal, which are all about equally important. Access to a rail terminal plays no significant role in the location choice of logistics companies in Flanders.     

A literature review on accessibility using bibliometric analysis techniques

Accessibility is a key concept in the field of transportation, and there is a rich amount of reviews available on this topic which concentrate on certain perspectives. However, none of them presents a comprehensive and quantitative overview on accessibility-related publications. To fill this gap, this study reviewed two decades of publications (during 2000–2019) drawn from Web of Science (WoS), and aims to figure out the evolution pathway of accessibility related studies so that future research directions can be recognized. By employing the bibliometric analysis techniques, this study provides the potential to trace historical and geographic trends at global level, covering leading journals and institutions, keywords characteristics, citation network analysis, and a qualitative review of the most influential papers. The output results show that there is an increasing geographic spread along with the growth spurt of research publications on the topic of accessibility especially since 2010s. Both the keywords' characteristics and citation network analysis help to identify research hot points, categorized as new indicators development and accessibility-based applications. Finally, this paper highlights the need for further studies for those two hot points respectively. It is hoped the results output here could benefit researchers engaging in this field to sharpen their own future research directions, and provide practitioners with a greater understanding of the various types of accessibility metrics and help them to identify the most appropriate practice for their specific situation.     

Social inequalities of park accessibility in Shenzhen,China: The role of park quality,transport modes,and hierarchical socioeconomic characteristics

Identifying the geographic units with restricted access to intra-urban parks has become a hot issue in transport studies. Previous literature has examined the social inequalities of park accessibility under the Western context; however, the issue has seldomly investigated against the non-Western background, especially in China. Using a case of Shenzhen (China), this paper examines the accessibility to parks of three quality levels (official standard) under four transport modes (public transit, walking, bicycle, and private car). In particular, the daily travel time from each community (8117) to each park (625) was harvested from the Baidu Map during 18:30–20:30 in July 2016. We further, based on the travel time calculations, develop four baseline indicators (the weighted average, the minimum, the maximum, and the standard deviation travel time) and three tolerance indicators of park accessibility (weighted average travel time within visit tolerance thresholds, standard deviation travel time within visit tolerance thresholds, and number of parks within visit tolerance thresholds) to measure park accessibility for each community. Results show that the seven accessibility indicators generate different estimations and the quantified accessibility varies greatly with park quality levels and transport modes. Communities present greater variations in accessibility to the first quality level and second quality level parks via walking and public transit. In addition, hierarchical regression is utilized to quantify the relationships between park accessibility and sociodemographic characteristics at two geographic levels (community and district). It is found that the associations are subjected to park quality, transport modes, and geographic levels. In particular, we discover significant social inequalities in park accessibility under the mode of public transit, walking, and bicycle. Our study should provide some new insights into accessibility research and advance the understanding of unequal park provision in developing countries.     

The impacts of congestion on automobile accessibility. What happens in large European cities?

Every day, a significant part of the population in large cities suffers transport congestion. One effect of this is a change in the spatial distribution of accessibility, which may lead to people or businesses finding themselves temporally in areas where accessibility values are lower than either desired or required. This paper studies changes in automobile accessibility over the course of the day, as caused by congestion of the road network in eight metropolitan areas of the European Union: London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome, Hamburg and Milan. The study was carried out using millions of data points on real speeds on segments of the road networks gathered over the course of two years from TomTom® devices, which provided for the incorporation of a dynamic perspective of accessibility. In each of the areas studied, the different impacts of congestion on automobile accessibility can be observed from differences in the distribution of opportunities and the provision of infrastructures, as well as from differences in culture and customs. Despite these differences, all cities experience two peaks with a lower value during the morning and afternoon. However, results show differences in the intensity and form of the effects of congestion on accessibility in these metropolitan areas. London, Paris and Rome are the cities where congestion has the greatest impact on automobile accessibility, while the Spanish cities are hardly affected by it.     

E-shoppers and multimodal accessibility to in-store retail: An analysis of spatial and social effects

Amidst the growing interest in enhancing the academic understanding of the relationships between e-shopping and transport, a key element remains underexplored – the impact of e-shopping on spatial accessibility to in-store retail. The paper studies variations in multimodal accessibility to in-store retail between e-shopper groups and the associated spatial effects. The research is based on a face-to-face questionnaire, administered in the city of Alcalá de Henares (Madrid Metropolitan Area, Spain), which provides data on socio-economic characteristics, e-shopping habits, and travel time preferences to reach in-store retail. Clustering techniques serve to identify three e-shopper groups: occasional e-shoppers with a car, infrequent e-shoppers with a car, and frequent e-shoppers without a car. A comparison of e-shopper distance-decay functions to reach in-store retail is made, revealing significant differences between the three e-shopper groups for car and public transport for any time interval. However, for walking such differences are limited to time intervals between 10 and 40 min. Distance-decay functions are processed through a gravity-based model, identifying five categories of multimodal accessibility places that provide information on how in-store retail locations may be affected by e-shopping habits. The paper closes with concluding remarks on policy-making and a few pathways for future research.     

Accessible accessibility research challenges

Accessibility is a key concept in the field of transport geography. There is a rich, though not very mature, body of literature on this topic which is largely application-driven. The focus in the literature is generally on methods and concept and/or on applications. Applications generally focus on ex ante or ex post evaluations of the implications for accessibility of (candidate) policy plans. An important question is which are the main challenges in the area of accessibility research? This paper aims to examine this question and provide a research agenda for the coming one or two decades or so. The focus is on putting relatively new topics on the agenda, rather than making suggestions for improvements of given accessibility indicators. The paper does not aim to provide a complete list, but rather proposes avenues for future research focusing on (1) indicators to express accessibility, and (2) evaluation. In the area of indicators the challenges include the impact of ICT on accessibility; the inclusion of the robustness of the transport system in indicators; comparing perceptions of accessibility and traditional accessibility indicators; the option value; and the indicators of accessibility for goods transport, air transport, and slow modes. In the area of evaluation the paper discusses the pros and cons of the logsum as an accessibility measure, ethical aspects, comparisons of accessibility indicators to evaluate a specific case, and the needs of the clients of accessibility research.     

Prioritizing low-stress and equitable bicycle networks using neighborhood-based accessibility measures

As cities across the United States strive to create comfortable bicycle networks for mainstream users, three topics have garnered attention: project prioritization criteria, accessibility to everyday destinations, and social equity. However, these topics have not often been integrated in research or practice. This paper introduces a method to assess the extent to which reductions in “Bicycle Level of Traffic Stress” (LTS) on segments of a citywide bicycle network increase accessibility to supermarkets, pharmacies, banks, and public libraries. Six accessibility performance measures are developed and evaluated for 278 neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland using a GIS-based approach. The demographic distributions of accessibility results are further analyzed, focusing on disadvantaged populations. Using a set of 106 proposed bicycle projects, the marginal accessibility gains and cumulative demographic impact across affected neighborhoods are assessed for each project. These results are ranked and crosslisted to identify a set of projects that balance accessibility gains with equity objectives. The prioritization results demonstrate some overlap with the short-term priorities embodied in City of Baltimore's 2015 Bike Master Plan, but they also highlight projects in other areas, specifically those that would serve neighborhoods most disadvantaged in terms of racial segregation, high poverty rates, and low rates of vehicle ownership.     

Balancing time: Using a new accessibility measure in Rio de Janeiro

One of the most common applications of accessibility is in evaluating inequality in access to jobs. A vital factor to be incorporated by accessibility indicators when analyzing job accessibility is the competition for job positions by job seekers; otherwise, the results may be inaccurate or misleading. Despite efforts by researchers to develop accessibility measures that capture job competition, they fail to ensure that these measures are practical and easily interpretable and communicable, which in turn makes planners and policymakers continue to opt for more straightforward measures. In this paper we aim to fill this gap by providing a simple accessibility measure that accounts for competition effects, while remaining practical, intuitive, and highly communicable. The proposed indicator – Balancing Time – is applied to assess the inequality in job accessibility in 160 neighborhoods within the city of Rio de Janeiro, and the results are compared with the most popular indicator used in practice, the cumulative opportunities. The findings suggest that Balancing Time overcomes some of the limitations of cumulative opportunities and that it is a useful tool for planners, particularly in the cities with job opportunities concentrated in central areas. Given its simplicity, Balancing Time is especially relevant in the context of the Global South, where most transport agencies face data limitations and have low skilled technical staff.     

Factors influencing the location of new motorways: large scale motorway building in Spain

Since the 1980s Spain has developed an ambitious road building programme with the construction of approximately 12,000 km of new motorways. This article analyses the factors related to the placement of these new motorways during two distinct planning periods from 1983 to 1993 and 1994 to 2004. Motorway placement strongly followed the existing radial road network dating back as far as the eighteenth century which illustrates the critical role that past decisions play in the placement of new investment. Motorway placement was also significantly related to population size and, more in general, the urban system. The empirical analysis, however, provides little evidence that motorways were placed in response to local economic growth.     

Accessibility impacts of China’s high-speed rail network

The large-scale implementation of High-Speed Rail (HSR) network in China not only offers a new option for travelers’ mode choice, but also may influence, or even generate, the redistribution of demographic and economic activities. As has been observed over the past several years in other countries, the impact of HSR spans a wide range. However, few quantitative studies have been conducted to measure this impact. As a new attempt, this study uses accessibility analysis for quantifying the impact of China’s HSR network. Weighted average travel times and travel costs, contour measures, and potential accessibility are employed as indicators of accessibility at the macro or national level. Forty-nine major cities in the HSR network are used in the accessibility analysis. Accessibility quantification and spatial distribution analysis for the study cities are performed on a Geographical Information System (GIS) platform. Accessibilities associated with varying availabilities of HSR, conventional rail, and airline are estimated and compared. The selected indicators and computational methods are found effective in evaluating the accessibility impacts of HSR from different conceptualization strategies and perspectives. They also offer complementary information on accessibility capacity of the study cities created by the HSR network.     

Location, economic potential and daily accessibility: an analysis of the accessibility impact of the high-speed line Madrid–Barcelona–French border

This paper evaluates the accessibility impact of the future Madrid–Barcelona–French border high-speed line. Accessibility impact of the new infrastructure is measured by means of three indicators: weighted average travel times, economic potential and daily accessibility. These indicators respond to different conceptualizations and offer complementary information about the issue accessibility. The results are quite different: very concentrated effects in the daily accessibility indicator, less concentrated in the economic potential one and more dispersal in the location indicator. The sign (polarizing/balancing) of these effects depend on the geographic scale: polarizing effects at the national level and balancing effects at both corridor and European levels are identified. A geographic information system (GIS) was used to carry out this study.     

Accessibility improvement,territorial cohesion and spillovers: a multidimensional evaluation of two motorway sections in Poland

The aim of this paper is to contribute to previous methodological studies of the approach to potential accessibility used in the evaluation of development of the road network. This is done by making a threefold analysis, which combines the overall improvement in the level of accessibility, territorial cohesion, and spatial spillovers. Moreover, we use different spatial dimensions (namely national and international) and different distance decay parameters to estimate both the short trips (e.g. commuting) and the long trips (e.g. business trips or tourism). The results are presented at a very detailed spatial scale (i.e. municipalities – LAU-2 units).The paper provides empirical evidence of improvement in accessibility, changes in the degree of territorial cohesion, and spatial spillovers resulting from the recent completion of two sections of motorway in Poland. The selected case studies differ according to their location (i.e. national and European, peripheral vs. central location), population density, and the settlement structure around the investment.The validity of the proposed multidimensional approach to the evaluation of road investments is verified as the combination of different accessibility dimensions and leads to results which differ respecting efficiency, equity and spillover effects. This paper provides arguments to strengthen the need for the tailor-made parameters of potential accessibility indicator and spatial dimension of analysis. They should be adjusted to the main aim of the particular evaluation.     

Understanding accessibility through public transport users' experiences: A mixed methods approach

The quantitative measurement of accessibility through public transport has become more complex and accurate over time. However, it lacks many of the deeper nuances of how people actually experience their travel environments. Our previous works have highlighted the importance of incorporating the lived travel experiences of passengers within accessibility indicators, considering the quality of the walking environment and different attributes of the public transport services.Building on these works, this mixed-method research seeks to further improve the characterization of accessibility according to users' travel experiences, as described by those attributes that inhibit or enhance access to opportunities within the city. We use content analysis of focus groups, data gathered in a brief survey and sociodemographic and public transport data for our analyses. Our main contributions are (i) to develop a conceptual framework to analyze qualitative data on how people relate and discuss their public transport accessibility experiences and (ii) to develop accessibility indicators differentiating user perceptions. We apply this novel conceptual framework and methods to the unique urban morphology of two municipalities of Santiago de Chile.We identified different ‘socially constructed’ narratives for buses and metro. The participants focused on barriers to accessibility, showing an important relationship between them, as well as substantial differences in their overarching positive perception of metro and negative for buses. However, when disaggregating the analysis by primary transport mode and location, we found ‘hidden’ values for buses, recognizing its capillarity and underlying connectivity with the metro system. Furthermore, we found a dissimilar perception of transport environments when disaggregating the analysis by gender, age and location, which translated into different accessibility profiles for the various public transport users. From these experiential qualitative perspectives, it was thus possible to determine some attributes that had been previously overlooked in more quantitative studies but which are important when analyzing public transport accessibility for different population groups.     

Road accessibility and cohesion in lagging regions: Empirical evidence from Portugal based on spatial econometric models

A number of transportation infrastructure projects were conducted in Europe during the 1990s with the explicit objective of promoting regional cohesion goals through the improvement of the accessibility of peripheral regions. Given its peripheral situation in the Union, Portugal was a key target for some of these projects. A decade later, it is pertinent to ask whether the new infrastructure achieved its objective of promoting lagging regions. The objective of this paper is to analyze one of the lagging regions in Portugal, to try to establish the link between changes in accessibility levels brought by improvements in the transportation network, and two indicators commonly used in accessibility research (population and purchasing power), while controlling other variables of possible relevance, such as the levels of educational achievement of the population in the region. The analysis is based on the use of spatially autoregressive models which allow the representation of accessibility as spatially lagged variables of first and second order. The results place the contribution of accessibility changes in context, and point at the relevance of education as an alternative policy.