Accessibility Analyst: An Integrated GIS Tool for Accessibility Analysis in Urban Transportation Planning

The authors present an integrated GIS tool, Accessibility Analyst, for accessibility analysis in urban transportation planning, built as an extension to the desktop GIS software package, ArcView. Accessibility Analyst incorporates a number of accessibility measures, ranging from catchment profile analysis to cumulative-opportunity measures, gravity-type measures, and utility-based measures, contains several travel-impedance measurement tools for estimating the travel distance, time, or cost by multiple travel modes along actual travel routes, and interoperates with GIS data-management and data-integration, spatial-analysis, network-analysis, surface-modelling, and spatial-visualisation functions. Undertaking accessibility analysis with use of Accessibility Analyst allows the user to take full advantage of a GIS to produce spatial distributions of accessibility over a region. It can be applied to a wide range of issues in urban transportation planning, such as for studies on the relationship between transportation and land use, evaluation of transportation network efficiency, transportation infrastructure planning, and for impact assessments relating to transportation policies.