Abstract
In the last decades, the acceleration of urban growth has led to an unprecedented level of urban interactions and interdependence. This situation calls for a significant effort among the scientific community to come up with engaging and meaningful visualizations and accessible scenario simulation engines. The present paper gives a contribution in this direction by providing general methods to evaluate accessibility in cities based on public transportation data. Through the notion of isochrones, the accessibility quantities proposed measure the performance of transport systems at connecting places and people in urban systems. Then we introduce scores ranking cities according to their overall accessibility. We highlight significant inequalities in the distribution of these measures across the population, which are found to be strikingly similar across various urban environments. Our results are released through the interactive platform: www.citychrone.org, aimed at providing the community at large with a useful tool for awareness and decision-making.
Highlights
The inherent complexity of the emerging challenges human beings collectively face requires a deep comprehension of the underlying phenomena in order to plan effective strategies and sustainable solutions
The extreme generality of the term accessibility depends on the specific aspects one could be interested in: the availability of jobs in a specific area, the quality of the schools in a neighbourhood, the possibility to take part in leisure activities depending on the time of the day
We took a specific angle by looking at the city and at the paths within it from the point of view of travelling times, which allows mapping the city in a way much closer to individuals’ perception. The cornerstone of this approach is the computation of isochronic maps and, based on them, the introduction of several scores that take into account the performance of public transport to connect areas and people
Summary
The inherent complexity of the emerging challenges human beings collectively face requires a deep comprehension of the underlying phenomena in order to plan effective strategies and sustainable solutions. Scientific investigation into the complexity of urban environments This availability of data fostered studies 2 aimed at identifying the patterns of coevolution of human and social behaviours [4,5,6,7] as well as innovation at the level of infrastructures and services [8,9,10,11,12]. Accessibility can be described as the capacity of cities to allow people to move efficiently by guaranteeing equity and equal access to personal and professional opportunities From this perspective, accessibility does not mean only the overall capacity of urban transit: it needs to be inflected as the accessibility of specific areas, for particular people with specific purposes. The availability of data related to mobility allows for the compilation of very accurate isochronic maps for different locations, different geographical areas, different social communities and different transportation systems
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