ACCESSIBILITY MEASURES: EVALUATION OF JOB ACCESSIBILITY, AND RELATED SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF LAND-USE SCENARIOS

This paper describes how accessibility plays an important role in policy making, and is a concept used in a number of scientific fields such as transportation planning, urban planning and geography. Traditional evaluations of land-use policies, plans or scenarios in the Netherlands include the impacts of land-use changes on passenger mobility (mainly car use), energy use and accessibility. Accessibility is often evaluated using 'infrastructure-based' measures such as those for congestion levels and average travel times or speeds on the road network. However, these measures have great disadvantages: infrastructure-based accessibility measures show the functioning of the road network but not the level of access to spatially distributed activities. Activity-based accessibility measures, often used in geographical studies, are not put to the same use in policy evaluations. This paper reviews literature on activity-based accessibility measures, it describes advantages and disadvantages related to interpretability, data requirements and methodological aspects, i.e. empirical and/or theoretical background and the incorporation of competition effects, and (ii) their capability of evaluating land-use and transport changes, and related social and economic impacts. Secondly, several activity-based accessibility measures are used to analyze the accessibility impacts of two land-use transportation scenarios for the Netherlands for the 1995-2020 time period. The paper is structured as follows. After the introduction, Section 2 presents a review of accessibility measures, followed by Section 3 describing the methodology used for applying accessibility measures in a case study. Section 4 describes the results, Section 5 the conclusions and Section 6 further research steps. The paper is based on the study described in Geurs & Ritsema van Eck.