Speaker
Description
Measuring inequalities in accessibility is a common subject in transport research. Yet, the question of how the choice of destinations affects the results is seldom asked. The paper addresses this issue by providing an overview of existing literature and comparing accessibility to five categories of destinations typically considered in such analyses: education, jobs, healthcare, retail, and green areas. Four Polish second-tier cities — Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, and Gdańsk — are used as case studies. For each category of destinations, accessibility scores are calculated taking into account three sustainable modes of transport: walking, cycling, and public transport. The scores are then compared to population distributions, and indicators of spatial autocorrelation are used to identify areas of insufficient accessibility. Results suggest that the degree of equity in accessibility distribution varies across categories of destinations. The share of vulnerable residents in low accessibility clusters was higher for retail and green areas than for education, jobs, and healthcare. While the results also vary across the investigated cities, it may be concluded that accessibility was more equitable for some destinations whose distribution relies more on the public sector (i.e., education) than for primarily market-driven destinations (i.e., retail). The proposed method can be useful in identifying areas of socio-economic vulnerability that require improvements in accessibility.
| Keywords | accessibility; equity; sustainable mobility; urban planning; Poland |
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