2015-01-13 Advancing Accessibility: New Measures, Tools, and Stakeholder Engagement Strategies for Boston and Beyond by Anson Stewart and Chris Zegras.

1. ADVANCING ACCESSIBILITY
NEW MEASURES, TOOLS,AND STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
STRATEGIESFOR BOSTONAND BEYOND
Anson Stewart
Chris Zegras
MIT | ALC-BRT Centre of Excellence
13 January 2015

2. Outline
• Improving Accessibility Measures
• Traditional Measures
• Policy Opportunities
• Potential Enhancements
• Integrating Planning Tools
• Existing Tools
• New Interfaces
• Refining Stakeholder Engagement Strategies
• BRT Implementation Conflicts
• Innovative Communication Platforms
• Applications

3. IMPROVING ACCESSIBILITY
MEASURES

4. Traditional Accessibility Measures
• Hansen (1959)
• Cumulative opportunity and gravity measures

5. Traditional Use
Second Regional Plan, RPA (1968)
• Accessibility measures have been suggested for decades
• But “agencies charged with delivering urban transport increasingly tend to
see the continual expansion of mobility as their sole mission. The result is
the spread out and socially segregated metropolitan regions...[that] hinder
access for the urban population as a whole.” (Sclar and Lonnroth, 2014)

6. Policy Opportunities
• Commitment to
accessibility emerging as a
goal
• USDOT Ladders of
Opportunity and Partnership
for Sustainable Communities
• California SB 743
• But specific performance
measures still lacking

7. Effective Measures
• Evaluation criteria for accessibility performance indicators
(Geurs and Van Wee, 2004):
• Theoretical basis
• Operationalization
• Interpretability and communicability
• Usability in social and economic evaluations
7

8. Accessibility Performance Indicators
• Theoretical basis: congestion biases (Tuttle, 2014)
• Operationalization: improving with new analysis tools
• Communicability: improving with new visualization tools
• Usability in evaluations: expanding (e.g. use by DVRPC
and Philadelphia transit providers)

9. Congestion and Competition
Accessibility Limits
• Cumulative Opportunities – Maximum potential
• Rival Opportunities – Competition
• Cordon Capacity – Corridor Crowding
• Transport Capacity – Network Effects
• Emerging models take some of these into account using
economic theory and queuing theory (e.g. Ha et al., 2011;
Tuttle, 2014; Shen and Zhao, 2014)
9

10. INTEGRATE PLANNING
TOOLS

11. Existing Tools – Accessibility
http://accessibilityplanning.eu

12. Existing Tools – Planning
• TransitMix.net
• Open Trip Planner
• Open Trip Planner Analyst
• GTFS Tools

13. Integrating Tools

14. REFINE STAKEHOLDER
ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES

15. Contentious BRT Implementation

16. eBRT
Testing in Boston and Santiago
• Generally clear understanding of the
tool and how it could be used to
represent trips common to riders'
everyday access experiences and
relate them to broader concerns of
advocacy groups
• Definite potential to foster mutual
learning
• Equity implications clear
• Capabilities to generate visualizations
quickly, while possibly not as robust or
feature-rich as proprietary software
(Stewart, 2014)

17. CityScope
(MIT Media Lab)

18. Power Relations
• Common platform for dialogue allows for meaningful
participation
• Mutual learning/“Double loop learning”
(Goodspeed 2013,
adapted from Batista 2008)

19. BOSTON

20. Boston BRT Working Group
• Government agencies, community
groups, and other stakeholders
• Six corridors identified
• Concerned about public acceptance

21. 21

22. 22

23. 23

24. BEYOND

25. Advancing Accessibility
Improving Measures and Tools
-Reflect actual service and
uncertainties
-Incorporate capacity
constraints
-Include land-use
interactions
Embedding in Policy
-Set as explicit goal in
service, capital, and long-
range planning
-Separate from mobility
-Consider institutional
constraints and power
relations
Using in Project Development
-Revising project evaluation
-Better understanding
geography of impacts
-Interactive communication
-Structured public
participation
Comparison for Boston: Los Angeles, Santiago, or London

26. Conclusion
• Improve measures by incorporating congestion and
competition
• Calculate measures using platform of integrated tools
• Test with user groups
• Highlight wider benefits of transit investment

27. ADVANCING ACCESSIBILITY
NEW MEASURES, TOOLS,AND STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
STRATEGIESFOR BOSTONAND BEYOND
Anson Stewart
Chris Zegras
MIT | ALC-BRT Centre of Excellence
13 January 2015

28. References
• Eros, Emily. 2014. “Transportation Data as Disruptive Innovation in Mexico
City.” MCP Thesis, MIT. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90096
• RPA. 1968. Second Regional Plan. http://library.rpa.org/pdf/RPA-Plan2-
Jamaica-Center.pdf
• Sclar, Elliott, and Måns Lönnroth. 2014. “Getting There/Being There:
Financing Enhanced Urban Access in the 21st Century City.” In Urban Access
for the 21st Century, edited by Elliott Sclar, Måns Lönnroth, and Christian
Wolmar, 1–10.
• Wong, James C. 2013. “Use of the General Transit Feed Specification
(GTFS) in Transit Performance Measurement.” Graduate Thesis, Georgia
Institute of Technology. http://projects.jameswong.org/thesis/thesis.pdf