Accessibility measures: review and applications. Evaluation of accessibility impacts of land-use transportation scenarios, and related social and economic impact

This report describes an extensive literature study and three case studies aimed at reviewing accessibility measures for their ability to evaluate the accessibility impacts of national land-use and transport scenarios, and related social and economic impacts. Several activity- and utility-based accessibility measures were computed to analyse job accessibility by car and public transport in the Netherlands for: (1) the (base) year 1995, (2) a Trend, or business-as-usual, scenario, representing the continuation of (restrictive) Dutch land-use policies and historical land-use trends for 1995-2020, (2) a Tolerant scenario, representing a land-use scenario, in which consumers' housing preferences determine land-use developments for 1995-2020. The scenarios are based on calculations using national land-use models and a national transport model. The main conclusion arising from this study is that the current Dutch practice of evaluating the (infrastructure-based) accessibility impacts of (land-use) transport projects, plans or scenarios can be improved by estimating activity-based accessibility measures, using existing land-use and transport data, and/or models. Activity-based accessibility measures are very well able to analyse accessibility impacts, satisfactorily incorporate the different components of accessibility (i.e. the transport, land-use, temporal and individual components) and serve as a useful tool for analysing social impacts. Utility-based accessibility measures may provide a useful basis for economic evaluations of land-use transport scenarios, but further research is necessary to analyse the added value to existing evaluation methods.