Structural accessibility for mobility management

Abstract

Urban mobility problems, such as congestion, have been threatening the quality of life and the competitiveness of urban areas as well as their sustainable development. The need to integrate land use and transport policies has been widely recognised as an important approach within the ‘predict and prevent’ paradigm for mobility management. Nevertheless, such integration is seldom put into practice. The lack of design support tools is pointed out as one of the reasons for this fact.The accessibility concept is believed to provide a useful framework to support the design of integrated land use and transport policies. This paper hypothesises that measures of comparative accessibility by transport mode can operationalise the accessibility concept for this purpose. In order to test this hypothesis, a design support tool was developed, based on a measure of comparative accessibility – the Structural Accessibility Layer (SAL). The usefulness of the tool, and thereby of comparative accessibility, was tested. First, the SAL is applied to a case study – Greater Oporto – and then evaluated through expert interviews. The case study provides insight into its potentials as design support tool for integrated land use and transport policies. Expert interviews enable the assessment of the robustness, usefulness and applicability of the tool. The results suggest that the SAL provides a useful operational form of the accessibility concept for design support. This research concludes that measures of structural accessibility seem to provide a useful design support framework for integrated land use and transport policy, shedding light on the sustainability of potential mobility enabled by land use and transport conditions.