Making accessibility analyses accessible: A tool to facilitate the public review of the effects of regional transportation plans on accessibility

Authors

  • Aaron Golub Arizona State University
  • Glenn Robinson Morgan State University
  • Brendan Nee BlinkTag, Inc

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.v6i3.352

Keywords:

Accessibility, Regional Transportation Plan

Abstract

The regional transportation planning process in the United States has not been easily opened to public oversight even after strengthened requirements for public participation and civil rights considerations. In the effort to improve the public review of regional transportation plans, this paper describes the construction of a proof-of concept web-based tool designed to analyze the effects of regional transportation plans on accessibility to jobs and other essential destinations. The tool allows the user to analyze disparities in accessibility outcomes by demographic group, specifically income and race, as required by civil rights-related planning directives. The tool makes cumulative-opportunity measures of the number of essential destinations reachable within certain times by public transit and automobile. The tool is constructed to analyze the San Francisco Bay Area’s 2005 regional transportation plan. Users can choose to make measures for a particular neighborhood or for all neighborhoods in the region with certain demographic characteristics. Two example analyses are shown with an interpretation and discussion of calculator outputs.

Author Biographies

Aaron Golub, Arizona State University

Assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and School of Sustainability at Arizona State University

Glenn Robinson, Morgan State University

Research Engineer, School of Engineering and Institute for Urban Research at the Morgan State University

Brendan Nee, BlinkTag, Inc

Co-Founder, BlinkTag Inc.

Downloads

Published

2013-11-14

How to Cite

Golub, A., Robinson, G., & Nee, B. (2013). Making accessibility analyses accessible: A tool to facilitate the public review of the effects of regional transportation plans on accessibility. Journal of Transport and Land Use, 6(3), 17–28. https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.v6i3.352

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 3 (2013)

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with JTLU agree to the following terms: 1) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License 4.0 that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. 2) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. 3) Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.