Betweenness-accessibility: Estimating impacts of accessibility on networks

Abstract

Accessibility is a central concept in transport geography research that has been described as a holistic measure of transportation and land use systems. This concept has numerous implementations, but virtually all share the way accessibility is measured as an attribute of pairs of origins and destinations. Borrowing from concepts in network science, in this paper we propose a new centrality measure called betweenness-accessibility. This measure couples the familiar betweenness indicator of social networks with the geographical concept of accessibility. Betweenness-accessibility is useful to estimate the impacts of accessibility on networks as potential for interaction is reflected on them. The new measure is illustrated using a reproducible example. In addition, an application to vulnerability analysis in the city of Zurich, Switzerland, provides an empirical case study to showcase the usefulness of betweenness-accessibility.