The Urban Accessibility Explorer is an easy-to-use mapping system that measures the number of activities that can be reached by residents of specified neighborhoods within a given amount of travel time, by a particular mode and time of day.
(Updated 04/16/2015) The Metropolitan Chicago Accessibility Explorer is an easy-to-use mapping system that measures the number of activities, including various types of jobs, schools, parks, stores and libraries, that can be reached by residents of specified neighborhoods within a given amount of travel time, by a particular mode and time of day in the Chicago Metropolitan area. The results are displayed on maps that can be adjusted by scale and area. The Accessibility Explorer was developed by the Urban Transportation Center, which is a unit of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago help policy makers, planners, and the general public easily evaluate how transportation system and land use change could alter accessibility.
This is an example of a new class of accessibility-based mapping tools, which also includes WalkScore and TransitScore, and the Access To Jobs Mapping System developed by the Regional Planning Association in the New York City region.
These tools help apply accessibility-based planning, which recognizes that the ultimate goal of most transport activity is access to goods and services, and that many factors can affect accessibility including the convenience, speed, and affordability of travel by various modes, transport network connectivity, land use density, and mix, and mobility substitutes such as telecommunications and delivery services.
(The post was updated to give proper credit to the developers of the app.)
Read the full story: Metropolitan Chicago Accessibility Explorer
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Should society encourage parents to drive children to school rather than walk or bicycle? Should our transportation policies favor driving over walking, cycling, ridesharing, public transit and telecommuting? Probably not. There is no logical reason to favor automobile travel over other forms of accessibility, and there are lots of good reasons to favor efficient modes, so for example, schools spend at least as much to accommodate a walking or cycling trip as an automobile trip, and transportation agencies and employers spend at least as much to improve ridesharing and public transit commuting as automobile commuting.
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