“I’d Like Accessibility Analysis to Help Us Shape the Future”: Transportation Practitioners and Accessibility Measurement

Abstract

Transportation agencies are becoming increasingly interested in measuring accessibility, or the ease with which people can reach desired destinations. In part, the concept is attractive because it reflects the primary purpose of a transportation system—to connect people to the opportunities they value. Academic researchers have identified a wide range of accessibility measures that vary widely in their interpretability, data requirements, parameters, multimodalism, and relevance to different areas of transportation planning and decision making. At the same time, new data and tools that facilitate and improve accessibility measurement are proliferating. Despite the promise of access measures, the landscape is vast and expanding, which can be difficult for practitioners to navigate. In fact, the use of accessibility in practice is relatively limited, with only a small share of U.S. transportation agencies using these measures. In this paper, we draw from 45 interviews with transportation professionals and a follow-up survey to determine how U.S. transportation practitioners currently use accessibility measures, barriers to accessibility measurement, and opportunities to use accessibility measures moving forward. Our results point to a wide range of technical capacities and accessibility applications across agencies, a suite of considerations that influence whether and how accessibility measures are used, a desire among many practitioners to increase their use of accessibility, and barriers to doing so. We close with reflections on opportunities to expand and improve the use of accessibility measurement in practice to strengthen transportation decision making.