Using Place Rank to measure sustainable accessibility

Abstract

Sustainability and its implications for transport planning is an area of growing interest to researchers, transport practitioners and policy makers. This study draws from recent research on the concept and measurement of sustainable accessibility in urban areas. The paper focuses on the particular case of small urban areas, where walking and cycling represent a significant proportion of the overall travel mode share. The methodology suggested in this paper departs from the use of traditional gravity-based measures of accessibility and sustainability, which tend to focus on motorised modes of travel. Instead, the present study suggests an extension of the Place Rank accessibility method to incorporate a measurement of sustainability through the multi-modal analysis of commuting trips for the City of Galway, Ireland. The paper concludes that the use of a multi-modal approach to the measurement of sustainable accessibility offers an additional insight into the nature of urban commuting and the spatial distribution of employment in small cities, where the understanding of non-motorised travel-to-work mode use is of great importance for urban transport planning and practice.