Application: Accessibility Measures — What People Could Do

The heart of accessibility measures are potential opportunities. This characteristic means that as a performance metric, it assumes much less about the resources, preferences, and habits of users of the transportation network. Put another way, accessibility measures the choice landscape available to daily travelers. What individual travelers or households decide to choose from that landscape, how often, or by what mode, are separate questions (and ones continuously under study in travel behavior research). By measuring possibility in the form of accessibility, DOTs are redefining performance from moving vehicles efficiently to providing meaningful choices and opportunities for residents in their jurisdictions. It is self-evident that more opportunities and choices is better than fewer; there is clear directionality to the metric, although the question of how much accessibility change is meaningful would remain a point of discussion influenced by the values of the agency.