Cumulative versus Gravity-based Accessibility Measures: Which One to Use?

作者：Manuel Santana Palacios, Ahmed El-Geneidy · 发表于：Findings · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.32866/001c.32444 · 被引用次数：47 · 研究领域：Urban Transport and Accessibility、Transportation Planning and Optimization、Transportation and Mobility Innovations

This paper compares two popular approaches to calculate access to jobs by public transport: gravity and cumulative opportunities. Using data on commute patterns and public transport schedules from Montreal, Canada, we find cumulative opportunities-based measures estimated at the mean transit commute time and gravity-based measures generated through various decay functions are highly correlated – all above 0.9. This finding holds even when replicating the analysis for low- and non-low-wage jobs available in the same metropolitan region. These findings strongly suggest that easy-to-communicate and -operationalize cumulative opportunities accessibility constructs measured at the mean commute time perform similarly to more theoretically-sound gravity-based measures.