Measuring Accessibility: A Guide for Transportation and Land Use Practitioners
Type
Policy Brief or Report
Year
2021
Level
City or Town
State(s)
All States
Policy Areas
Transportation & Mobility
Developing and tracking accessibility metrics has many practical advantages, such as measuring how readily commuters can meet their needs and providing a common measure for assessing various transportation modes and modal investments. This guide addresses the need for accessibility measures in transportation and land practice, pointing to problems with existing metrics and introducing place-based metrics—cumulative-opportunity metrics and decay-weighted metrics. Additionally, this guide describes the types of transportation and land use data (i.e. level of stress traffic, U.S. Census data, walking and biking speeds) that are useful in calculating accessibility, with suggestions on how to obtain them and use them to calculate and report accessibility.