Evaluating equity and accessibility to jobs by public transport across Canada

Abstract

Accessibility, or the ease of reaching destinations, is increasingly being used and examined in both literature and practice. The most common accessibility metric, the cumulative opportunity measure, is often computed as the number of jobs that can be reached within a certain time frame. Aggregating all jobs, however, often inflates the opportunities that can be reached by socially vulnerable residents, which could feed into and/or generate inadequate policy decisions. This study therefore develops the measure of accessibility to low-income jobs for vulnerable residents by public transport, specifically taking into account realized travel times by these vulnerable individuals. This fine-grained measure, computed across 11 major Canadian cities, is a modified place-based accessibility metric that incorporates facets of person-based metrics, allowing planners and policy makers to propose more targeted interventions to improve the quality of life of their cities’ most vulnerable populations. The study further allows for direct comparisons between the impacts of variation in accessibility levels between different regions to help create best practices in land use and transport planning.