Deconstructing laws of accessibility and facility distribution in cities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how redistributing urban facilities can significantly improve accessibility, reducing travel costs by half, and provides a model to estimate necessary facilities for desired accessibility levels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of facility and population distribution interplay to optimize urban accessibility and provides a practical model for facility planning.

Findings

Travel costs can be halved through redistribution of facilities.

Average travel distance relates to number of facilities and population density.

Model can estimate facilities needed for target accessibility.

Abstract

The era of the automobile has seriously degraded the quality of urban life through costly travel and visible environmental effects. A new urban planning paradigm must be at the heart of our roadmap for the years to come. The one where, within minutes, inhabitants can access their basic living needs by bike or by foot. In this work, we present novel insights of the interplay between the distributions of facilities and population that maximize accessibility over the existing road networks. Results in six cities reveal that travel costs could be reduced in half through redistributing facilities. In the optimal scenario, the average travel distance can be modeled as a functional form of the number of facilities and the population density. As an application of this finding, it is possible to estimate the number of facilities needed for reaching a desired average travel distance given the population distribution in a city.