A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open source framework for measuring pedestrian accessibility worldwide using open data, enabling high-resolution, comparable urban analysis for better city planning.

Contribution

It develops a generalized, open data-based method and software for consistent pedestrian accessibility measurement across diverse cities globally.

Findings

Framework supports high-resolution, city-to-city comparisons.

Open source software is publicly available for reuse.

Method enables benchmarking and monitoring of urban accessibility.

Abstract

Pedestrian accessibility is an important factor in urban transport and land use policy and critical for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Developing and evaluating indicators measuring inequalities in pedestrian accessibility can help planners and policymakers benchmark and monitor the progress of city planning interventions. However, measuring and assessing indicators of urban design and transport features at high resolution worldwide to enable city comparisons is challenging due to limited availability of official, high quality, and comparable spatial data, as well as spatial analysis tools offering customizable frameworks for indicator construction and analysis. To address these challenges, this study develops an open source software framework to construct pedestrian accessibility indicators for cities using open and consistent data. It presents a generalized method to consistently measure pedestrian accessibility at high resolution and spatially aggregated scale, to allow for both within- and between-city analyses. The open source and open data methods developed in this study can be extended to other cities worldwide to support local planning and policymaking. The software is made publicly available for reuse in an open repository.