The Governors’ Institute on Community Design, a program of Smart Growth America recently released a new guide to help transportation agencies integrate measurements of access to opportunity into their planning, programming and investment decisions.
The Why and How of Measuring Access to Opportunity: A Guide to Performance Management features methods, tools and other resources for practitioners including a profile of the GIS-based Multimodal Accessibility tool created by Renaissance Planning. Renaissance has been working with the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) and the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) to further test and deploy accessibility based approaches and tools in support of transportation planning and decision-making efforts.
From the guidebook:
"The tool takes into account the number of opportunities (including jobs, retail, and service establishments) from a particular starting point as well as the travel time to those destinations. It can also model mode choice by calculating the likelihood that individuals will drive versus use other modes of transportation. Based on these calculations, the tool has been able to predict the overall mode share with a high level of accuracy for a particular corridor based on these calculations."
To download the guidebook and register for a February 16th webinar discussing and reviewing the guide, check out this blog post from Smart Growth for America.
If you’re interested in learning more about our Multimodal Accessibility research, framework and tools, check out some of the links below:
- Our ongoing blog series further explaining the science and methods behind our framework and tools
- Our Multimodal Accessibility initiatives page explaining the framework, its applications and showcasing some featured projects.