Abstract
Within the geography, transportation, and public health communities there has been intense interest in better understanding the linkages between health outcomes such as obesity rates and people's access to healthy foods. In this nexus, personal access to healthy food is shaped by a number of individual and geographical factors including people's time available for shopping, the quality of proximal food vendors (e.g. supermarkets vs. convenience stores), and the nature of the transportation systems available to facilitate mobility. Building on recent research in disaggregate accessibility modeling, including that of time geography, this paper describes an individual-level modeling approach for quantifying peoples' food environments. The approach works by measuring the accessibility people have to local food shopping opportunities given their activity patterns and available time budgets. Individuals' food accessibility may be compared to one another and the underlying mobility afforded by the transportation system is accounted for. Moreover, the individual-level measure is such that it may be resolved to places, whereby the aggregation and mapping of multiple individuals' food accessibility experiences is possible. Hence, possible ‘deserts’ or areas of inaccessibility may be identified through a bottom-up analysis of the travel and mobility experience of a representative sample of individuals. These ideas are demonstrated with spatial data from a smaller urban area in Florida. Results show that individual and place-based differences in food accessibility may be delineated with the metrics.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.