Development of Time Varying Accessibility Measures: Application to the Activity-Based Model for Southern California Region

Traditionally, temporal variation of accessibility measures within a day is captured implicitly using time-of-day specific skims. However, another important dimension of accessibility measures that relates to the supply side is often ignored. This component is the temporal variation of supply side land use or zonal employment which constraints the availability of opportunities to undertake activities during certain hours. The current study develops a conceptual framework for developing time-of-day specific accessibility measures that account for these supply side effects and use these measures within an operational activity-based model (ABM) for the Southern California region. Overall, the descriptive analysis of the accessibility measures and the model estimation results of choice models in the ABM suggest that the measures are able to quantify the intended spatial and temporal accessibility effects quite well thus enhancing the land-use policy sensitivity of the overall model.