The Insider: A Planners’ Perspective on Accessibility

Accessibility, the ease of reaching destinations, is a key land use and transportation performance measure that has been studied for decades by researchers. Nevertheless, its implementation in policy and practice is generally limited. The goal of this study is to identify the factors that foster and prevent the use of accessibility metrics by practitioners. In order to achieve this objective, a survey on the use of accessibility metrics was conducted among 343 practitioners around the world. Findings from the survey show a gap between knowledge of the concept of accessibility and its implementation in policy and practice. While 90% of the respondents are familiar with the concept, only 55% stated that they use accessibility metrics in their work. Whereas lack of support and interest does not appear to be a major obstacle to implementing accessibility metrics, lack of knowledge and data are highlighted as the main barriers to implementation in practice. These results suggest that further training is required to support the use of metrics by planners and policy-makers. Furthermore, including clear accessibility indicators in planning documents is key to promoting the use of metrics in policy and practice, as it was stated as a main reason motivating the generation of accessibility metrics. This research highlights potential avenues to support the integration of accessibility metrics in policy and practice and is of relevance to researchers, planners and policy-makers wishing to foster accessibility-based planning approaches.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB50 Standing Committee on Transportation Planning Applications.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Boisjoly, Geneviève
  • El-Geneidy, Ahmed
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References;
• Pagination: 19p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accessibility; Implementation; Metrics (Quantitative assessment); Policy making; Surveys; Transportation planning
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Policy; Transportation (General);

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01629989
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-01672
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 27 2017 9:29AM