advancing accessibility new measures, tools, and stakeholder engagement strategies for boston and...
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ADVANCING ACCESSIBILITY
NEW MEASURES, TOOLS, AND STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
STRATEGIES FOR BOSTON AND BEYOND
Anson Stewart
Chris Zegras
MIT | ALC-BRT Centre of Excellence
13 January 2015
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
IMPROVING ACCESSIBILITY
MEASURES
Traditional Accessibility Measures
• Hansen (1959)
• Cumulative opportunity and gravity measures
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)
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
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
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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)
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)
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INTEGRATE PLANNING
TOOLS
Existing Tools – Planning
• TransitMix.net
• Open Trip Planner
• Open Trip Planner Analyst
• GTFS Tools
Integrating Tools
REFINE STAKEHOLDER
ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES
Contentious BRT Implementation
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)
CityScope
(MIT Media Lab)
Power Relations
• Common platform for dialogue allows for meaningful
participation
• Mutual learning/“Double loop learning”
(Goodspeed 2013,
adapted from Batista 2008)
BOSTON
Boston BRT Working Group
• Government agencies, community
groups, and other stakeholders
• Six corridors identified
• Concerned about public acceptance
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BEYOND
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
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
ADVANCING ACCESSIBILITY
NEW MEASURES, TOOLS, AND STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
STRATEGIES FOR BOSTON AND BEYOND
Anson Stewart
Chris Zegras
MIT | ALC-BRT Centre of Excellence
13 January 2015
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