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Introducing spatial availability, a...
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Introducing spatial availability, a singly-constrained measure of competitive accessibility

Abstract

Accessibility indicators are widely used in transportation, urban, and healthcare planning, among many other applications. These measures are weighted sums of reachable opportunities from a given origin conditional on the cost of movement, and are estimates of the potential for spatial interaction. Over time, various proposals have been forwarded to improve their interpretability, mainly by introducing competition. In this paper, we demonstrate how a widely used measure of accessibility with congestion fails to properly match the opportunity-seeking population. We then propose an alternative formulation of accessibility with competition, a measure we call _spatial availability_. This measure results from using balancing factors that are equivalent to imposing a single constraint on conventional gravity-based accessibility. Further, we demonstrate how Two-Stage Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) methods can be reconceptualized as singly-constrained accessibility. To illustrate the application of spatial availability and compare it to other relevant measures, we use data from the 2016 Transportation Tomorrow Survey of the Greater Golden Horseshoe area in southern Ontario, Canada.

Authors

Soukhov A; Paez A; Higgins CD; Mohamed M

Publication date

August 26, 2022

DOI

10.31219/osf.io/sjd5n

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