SCC-CIVIC-PG Track A: Overcoming Mobility Inequity With New Open-Access Tools for Analyzing Spatial Accessibility

This grant, a joint endeavor of the University of Chicago, the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), and Brookings Institution, will fund a new set of indicators that will help people compare different neighborhoods in terms of “access poverty.” “Access poverty” is the idea that people who live in certain neighborhoods have a harder time getting where they need to go - for work, for school, for food, for services, and for care. This is a complicated problem; it involves housing, businesses, public and private transportation, infrastructure, jobs and employment opportunities, and essential local services.

To build these indicators, we need to work hand-in-hand with local organizations to learn more about which assets people consider essential, how they move around their neighborhoods, and the constraints on their time and choices. Historically, these questions have been considered primarily in terms of jobs and affordable housing; the “access poverty” indicator will ask bigger questions, taking into account the full range of ways in which people need to move around their neighborhoods in order to live their fullest lives.

The objective of this research is to create a set of indicators to assess the distribution of travel burdens across residential communities within the United States. “Travel burden” is measured in terms of time or distance spent moving from an origin to a destination. Given the complex nature of movement within cities, the team will account for several modes of transportation as well as detailed breakouts of travel burden across asset categories such as jobs, housing, retail corridors, schools, childcare sites, health clinics, and other places where people want or need to go in order to live productive and connected lives.

The research undertaken in the planning phase is to compare available methods for calculating travel burden at the neighborhood level and evaluate georeferenced points-of-interest datasets (as well as conventional employment and housing sources). There are many methodologies for measures of travel burden, these include isochrones, travel time matrices, and other spatial access techniques that use travel data and population characteristics to generate weighted travel costs.

These measures can help with benchmarking, identifying specific deficits across communities, and shed light on questions of equity both within cities and across metropolitan areas at scale. This project is supported by the CIVIC Innovation Challenge program Track A. Communities and Mobility: Offering Better Mobility Options to Solve the Spatial Mismatch Between Housing Affordability and Jobs through a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Energy Vehicle Transportation Office.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.