Questioning mobility ideals – the value of proximity for residents in socially deprived urban areas in Sweden

Despite discourses of contemporary high-mobility, a life characterised by high mobility is in sharp contrast to many people's experiences and personal preferences. Previous research has shown that mobility and transport opportunities are unevenly distributed in society. The paper explores how young unemployed people and low-skilled care workers in two Swedish urban municipalities prefer to travel less and stay local rather than undergoing time-consuming and expensive public transport trips. The results show that various temporal and spatial restrictions are significant regarding the extent to which public transport can cater for mobility needs, and that transport opportunities are part of an individual's opportunity to be socially included. The results indicate that other policy areas, such as the labour market policy and the public health policy, are equally important for social inclusion

Space-Time Representation of Accessible Areas for Wheelchair Users in Urban Areas (Short Paper)

Providing personalized information on the accessibility of urban places for people with disabilities can significantly increase their social participation. This information should be adapted with respect to their needs at the specific time and space. Location-based technologies are considered as proper services to provide such information and encourage mobility of these people in urban areas. However, generally these services focus on the spatial conditions of the accessibility and ignore users\u27 capabilities and time dependent constraints. This is much more challenging for people with disabilities given the diversity of their physical capabilities and preferences. To address this issue, we propose an approach to measure the space-time accessibility of urban areas considering environmental characteristics, users\u27 capabilities, and time constraints. The proposed approach is unique and it highlights time constraint that is rooted in time geography theory. Unlike the classical time geography, which suggests a uniform travel velocity, we consider a variable travel velocity in the proposed approach, which is more relevant to the mobility of people with disabilities. To implement the proposed method, a Fuzzy approach is applied to evaluate the wheelchair speeds for the segments of a pedestrian network. The proposed approach is implemented in Saint-Roch, Quebec City for a case study and the results are presented and discussed

An automated approach to enrich OpenStreetMap data on footways

Urbanization and the rising global life expectancy are shaping the 21st century, and an increasing number of the older and disabled population is expected, emphasizing the need of developing age-friendly and accessible cities for all. The disabled population encounters barriers in accessing public services that able-bodied people do not, especially on footways. OpenStreetMap (OSM) data is applied in many routing applications for disabled people but does still lack a considerable amount of accessibility information, for example, only less than 2% of OSM footpaths in the city of Zurich contain inclination information. This thesis aims to enrich OSM footpaths in the city of Zurich automatically with inclination information derived from a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and investigate the influence of inclination-enriched data on spatial accessibility. The spatial accessibility of three population groups (younger adults, older adults, and manual wheelchair users) to six main service providers (Healthcare Services, Daily Shopping, Public Services, Education, Leisure and Sports, Food and Drinks) was analysed using three different Floating Catchment Area (FCA) methods including 2SFCA, E2SFCA, and KD2SFCA. OSM footpaths were successfully enriched with inclination information using a high-resolution DEM. Results of the spatial accessibility analysis showed differences in the influence of accessibility enriched footpath data per population group, where manual wheelchair users were most affected in their spatial accessibility. Results from the 2SFCA method showed smallest areas that changed but a higher magnitude in change than the other two FCA methods, which yielded similar results. Furthermore, deprived areas concerning accessibility in the city of Zurich were found for all population groups and service providers in different areas of the city. The accessibility enriched footpath data can be used in spatial accessibility analysis, however, the data was not uploaded to OSM, as in other studies that applied an automated enrichment of OSM data. It can be concluded that mobility-impaired people such as manual wheelchair users are most affected by accessibility inhibiting barriers such as inclination. Furthermore, deprived areas concerning spatial accessibility are mainly found in areas where low accessibility and high demand and supply concur or when accessibility and supply are low. The results of this thesis confirmed the vulnerability of the mobility-impaired population in accessing public facilities, which strengthens the need for further research and development of an accessible city for all. Moreover, first insights in areas with lower spatial accessibility in the city of Zurich were made, which gives a basis for more in-depth research in this matter. The applied methods can be replicated if the necessary data is available