Chapter 11: Parcel-Level Mesure of Public Transit Accessibility to Destinations

Researchers and practitioners have long recognised accessibility as an important concept for consideration in transportation and land-use planning (Hansen, 1959; Willier, 1947). There has been much research conducted to operationalise this concept as practical and meaningful measurements (Kwan et al., 2003). There remains, however, a need for measurement techniques that can capture the multiple dimensions of accessibility as well as produce easily interpretable results. Although measures of the different components of accessibility— transportation, spatial, and temporal (Burns, 1979)—have been developed to various degrees in isolation, attempts to relate these parts and assess the whole have been rare until the recent past (Handy and Niemeier, 1997; Kwan et al., 2003). This is particularly true for the public transit mode.