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