Access Across America: Walking 2014

Accessibility is the ease of reaching valued destinations. It can be measured for various transportation modes, to different types of destinations, and at different times of day. There are a variety of ways to define accessibility, but the number of destinations reachable within a given travel time is the most comprehensible and transparent, as well as the most directly comparable across cities. This study estimates the accessibility to jobs by walking in the 50 largest (by population) metropolitan areas in the United States, and is a companion study to the authors' "Access Across America: Transit 2014" report. Rankings are determined by a weighted average of accessibility, giving a higher weight to closer jobs. Jobs reachable within ten minutes are weighted most heavily, and jobs are given decreasing weights as travel time increases up to 60 minutes. This report presents detailed accessibility values for each metropolitan area, as well as block-level maps which illustrate the spatial patterns of accessibility within each area. A separate publication, "Access Across America: Walking 2014 Methodology," describes the data and methodology used in this evaluation.