Measuring space–time accessibility to urban opportunities: a study on demand for and supply of activities performed by university teachers and students of Khulna City

Abstract

People participate in various activity places leading their livelihood pattern (raising family, working, shopping, recreation, socializing, etc.) to have services/opportunities in their reach. Activity in urban opportunity places requires space and time, which in turn are subject to accessibility of those opportunity places. An activitybased approach within time geographical framework can explain how accessible the opportunity places are, considering space (travel barrier) and time (limited time) constraints. This study uses two checks to measure the accessibility of an opportunity: fi rst, whether the opportunity place is within the Daily Potential Path Area (DPPA) of a participant; and second, whether the participant’s activity reach time is within the opportunity opening hours. Potential Path Area (PPA) delimits a geographical area containing all feasible routes and urban opportunities given the space time constraints determined by the particular pair of fiout of home activities, and then DPPA is prepared with the aggregation of all individual PPAs in a day. This study presents accessibility level of 10 major urban opportunity places, which are selected based on the frequency of participation performed by the university teachers and students of Khulna. This paper concludes by explaining the usefulness of the activity-based approach used in this study in accessibility studies over conventional accessibility measuring approaches.