Accessibility evaluation of land-use and transport strategies: review and research directions

A review of accessibility measures is presented for assessing the usability of these measures in evaluations of land-use and transport strategies and developments. Accessibility measures are reviewed using a broad range of relevant criteria, including theoretical basis, interpretability and communicability, and data requirements of the measures. Accessibility impacts of land-use and transport strategies are often evaluated using accessibility measures, which researchers and policy makers can easily operationalise and interpret, such as travelling speed, but which generally do not satisfy theoretical criteria. More complex and disaggregated accessibility measures, however, increase complexity and the effort for calculations and the difficulty of interpretation. The current practice can be much improved by operationalising more advanced location-based and utility-based accessibility measures that are still relatively easy to interpret for researchers and policy makers, and can be computed with state-of-the-practice data and/or land-use and transport models. Research directions towards theoretically more advanced accessibility measures point towards the inclusion of individual's spatial–temporal constraints and feedback mechanisms between accessibility, land-use and travel behaviour. Furthermore, there is a need for theoretical and empirical research on relationships between accessibility, option values and non-user benefits, and the measurement of different components of accessibility.