Recent advances and applications in accessibility modelling

Abstract

Accessibility is a concept that has become central to physical planning and spatial modelling for more than fifty years. As measure of the relative nearness or proximity of one place and persons to all other places or persons, conceptually linked to Newton's law of gravity, its origins can be traced back to the 1920s when it was used in location theory and regional economic planning (Batty, 2009) and retail planning (Stewart, 1948). In his classic paper, Hansen (1959) was the first to define accessibility as a potential of opportunities for interaction and applied the concept to forecast employment developments in Washington D.C. Hansen's gravity-based measure of accessibility was a generalization of the concept of population potential, which was based on the notion of potential in physics systems by Stewart (1948). Since then, accessibility analyses have addressed the issue of spatial interaction. Spatial Interaction Models (SIMs) provide an explicit link between accessibility modelling, and economic, demographic and transport flows. SIMs have a long history and have been used in a wide variety of contexts. Wilson (1970) gave SIMs theoretical strength by deriving them using the entropy maximization approach, and the doubly-constrained form formed the bases for transport flow modelling. The formal equivalence between SIMs and logit models/micro-economic theory was shown by Anas (1983). The accessibility function can be directly derived from SIMs and it therefore contains SIM behavioural cost components ( Reggiani, 2014). Moreover, the relevance of topological/connectivity structures in the accessibility analyses has, in some way, been anticipated by Weibull (1980), who considered accessibility as a property of configuration of opportunities for spatial interaction. Accessibility models have in the past decades been applied in several academic fields such as urban geography, rural geography, health geography, time geography, spatial economics and transport engineering. Many different applications have been developed in these fields and can be categorized in several ways. Here, we use the categorization of accessibility measures from the well-cited review paper from Geurs and Van Wee (2004). They provide an overview of components of accessibility and perspectives on accessibility, which we will use as a categorization of accessibility measures. Geurs and Van Wee distinguish four basic perspectives on accessibility: (i) infrastructure-based measures, analyzing the performance or service level of transport infrastructure, (ii) location-based measures, analyzing accessibility of spatially distributed activities, typically on an aggregate level, (iii) person-based measures, founded in the space-time geography, analyzing accessibility at the level of the individual level, and (iv) utility-based measures, analyzing the welfare benefits that people derive from levels of access to the spatially distributed activities. These perspectives focus on one or several of the four components of accessibility distinguished by Geurs and Van Wee: (i) the land-use component reflecting the amount, quality and spatial distribution of opportunities, (ii) the transportation component describing the disutility of travel in terms of time, cost and effort, (iii) the temporal component reflecting the temporal constraints and variability, and (iv) the individual component reflecting the needs, and abilities of individuals. Here, we describe the directions which academic literature in the recent years took to improve the treatment of the four components in accessibility modelling.... Language: en