Potential accessibility - an interesting conceptual framework to address strategic planning issues in the Amsterdam region?

It is difficult to prove a direct causal link between the spatial patterns of economic activities and the quality of the transport system. But it seems obvious that the transport system creates conditions, which enable economic activities to interact with each other. The concept of potential accessibility – or what and how can be reached from a given point in space within a certain travel time – can provide a useful conceptual framework to describe these conditions. For economic activities it is not the transport system itself that is important, but the fact that the transport systems provides them with access to workers, consumers et cetera. It is therefore necessary to take both the qualities of the transport system and the land-use system in to account, which is exactly what measuring potential accessibility does. Depending on the kind of economic activity you’re looking at different accessibility conditions may be important. This paper investigates for the Amsterdam region the quality of the potential accessibility on different scales (global - regional – local) and compares these qualities to the spatial pattern of different economic activities to see which qualities are more favorable to certain activities then others. Creating these favorable accessibility conditions is what planners of the land-use and transport system should aim for. The paper concludes with reviewing different regional planning policies to see if this is true.

Does Accessibility Planning address what matters? A review of current practice and practitioner perspectives

'Accessibility' has become commonplace in transport planning and as such there is a plethora of interpretations of what accessibility means, what constitutes a good measure of accessibility, and how this might be applied in practice. This paper presents an overview of approaches to measuring accessibility and presents a case study of Accessibility Planning in England — one approach to formalising the concept of accessibility. Results of semi-structured interviews with local authority officers are discussed to establish whether current approaches, allow their desired outcomes to be met. This approach demonstrates where there might be gaps between measured or modelled accessibility and the perceptions of the individuals. Findings suggest that while the process is deemed useful in raising the profile of accessibility issues, measures of accessibility do not necessarily easily translate into quantifying benefits of those improvements that are perceived by practitioners to improve accessibility and reduce transport disadvantage

Accessibility Planning tools for sustainable and integrated Land Use/Transport (LUT) development: an application to Rome

The paper fits into the themes of sustainable accessibility planning in urban areas, that can be defined as the integration of transport and land use planning to achieve sustainable development. In particular the study proposes a tool to support the choices of activities location, which is based on a new aggregate (zone-specific) indicator: the ‘Marginal Activity Access Cost’, providing estimation in monetary terms of the impacts on mobility and on the environment of locating one new activity in a specific zone of the urban area. The proposed indicator is validated through an application to the urban area of Rome

Re-enacting the mobility versus accessibility debate: Moving towards collaborative synergies among experts

The benefits of the accessibility approach in transport planning are well-known and widely documented in the literature. However, in practice, most transport planning processes are focused on improving mobility and not on improving accessibility. Recent research has made it clear that what is blocking the accessibility approach are not the technological dimensions of transport planning, or the lack of knowledge about how to perform accessibility planning in practice. This approach is being blocked instead by institutional barriers. This article critically identifies some of these barriers. Adopting a cross-disciplinary and international perspective, two rounds of in-depth interviews with accessibility experts were conducted. This allowed gathering insights not only about the institutional barriers to the adoption of the accessibility approach in transport planning practice, but also about possible pathways to make accessibility a more central concept in decision-making

Visuospatial working memory and mathematical ability at different ages throughout primary school.

a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o In this study, three aims were addressed: (1) validating a visuospatial working memory task in Math Garden, an adaptive online tool in which item difficulty and person ability are determined on the fly, (2) investigating the contribution of different item characteristics to the difficulty of the visuospatial working memory items, and (3) investigating relations between visuospatial working memory and various math domains at different ages. The method was validated by showing that item ratings were stable and grade differences in ability were significant. Regression analyses on the item level showed that not only sequence length, but also other characteristics, such as type of task (forward or backward), explained variance in item difficulty. Finally, regression analyses on the child level showed that visuospatial working memory and mathematics were significantly related: especially for addition and subtraction in the lower grades. For multiplication and division this relationship was weaker and without age trend

Evaluating the equity effects of road-pricing in the European urban context - The Madrid Metropolitan Area.

The paper identifies the potential spatial and social impacts of a proposed road-pricing scheme for different social groups in the Madrid Metropolitan Area (MMA). We appraise the accessibility of different districts within the MMA in terms of the actual and perceived cost of using the road infrastructure ‘before’ and ‘after’ implementation of the scheme. The appraisal framework was developed using quantitative survey data and qualitative focus group discussions with residents. We then simulated user behaviours (mode and route choice) based on the empirical evidence from a travel demand model for the MMA. The results from our simulation model demonstrated that implementation of the toll on the orbital metropolitan motorways (M40, M30, for example) decreases accessibility mostly in the districts where there are no viable public transport alternatives. Our specific study finding is that the economic burden of the road-pricing scheme particularly affects unskilled and lower income individuals living in the south of the MMA. The focus groups confirmed that low income drivers in the south part of the MMA would reduce their use of tolled roads and have to find new arrangements for these trips: i.e. switch to public transport, spend double the time travelling or stay at home. More generally, our research finds that European transport planners are still a long way from recognising the social equity implications of their policy decisions and that more thorough social appraisals are needed to avoid the social exclusion of low income populations when road tolling is proposed