Designing Accessibility Instruments

Book excerpt: The integration of land use and transport planning is key to making cities sustainable and liveable. Accessibility can provide an effective framework for this integration. However, today there is a significant gap between the advances in scientific knowledge on accessibility and its effective application in planning practice. In order to close this gap, Designing Accessibility Instruments introduces a novel methodology for the joint assessment and development of accessibility instruments by researchers and practitioners. The book: provides a theoretical and professional analysis of the main concepts behind the definition, use and measurement of accessibility; undertakes a comprehensive inventory and critical analysis of accessibility instruments, focusing on the bottlenecks in their transposition to planning practice; introduces and applies a novel methodology for the assessment and improvement of the practical use and usefulness of accessibility instruments; presents six in-depth illustrative case study applications of the methodology, representing a range of cities with different geographical and institutional settings, and different levels of urban and transport planning integration. The book is supported by a companion website – www.accessibilityplanning.eu – which extrapolates its content to a broader scope and keeps it updated and valid with new iterations of the methodology and further advances on the initial and new case studies.