Chapter 15: An Accessibility Framework for Evaluating Transport Policies

Most measures of accessibility lack the capability to evaluate the impacts of transport policies that can directly influence travel decisions. The major reason for this is that many measures of accessibility do not take into consideration enough of the factors that can be influenced by policies. Among such factors are those related to the attributes of individuals who undertake travel for the purpose of accessing activities. This paper argues that the focus of such measures should be on accessibility for individuals to activities rather than purely being a property of locations since the accessibility of a location does not necessarily reflect the true accessibility of an individual to that destination. Although accessibility to destinations is important it is only part of a person’s accessibility. The focus should be on accessibility to activities, which can be satisfied by a number of destination alternatives.