Travel Time and Distance as Relative Accessibility in the Journey to Work

Michael A. Niedzielski and E. Eric Boschmann

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2014, vol. 104, issue 6, 1156-1182

Abstract: The ability to access places of opportunity is dependent on the land use distribution, the transportation network connecting homes and activity sites, and sociodemographic-dependent mobility. Accessibility indicators are used as a planning tool to capture accessibility variations in the assessment and development of social, land use, and transportation policy. A number of metrics have been proposed to understand patterns of unequal access that typically fall under overlapping three pairs of contrasting notions of accessibility: place- versus person-based, normative versus positive, and potential versus actual. Variations in accessibility for different people in different locations might arise from the dynamic nature of the people–space–transportation triad. What is less explored is how these dynamics, resulting from the confluence of changing urban structures, diverging mobility resources, and socioeconomic transformations, might reveal unusual accessibility experiences based on unexpected travel time and distance relations. Quite simply, longer (shorter) distances can be traversed in shorter (longer) travel times than would be expected given a specific people–space–transportation situation. Using this linear and nonlinear perspective on time–distance relations, we define a new pair of contrasting notions: monotonic versus nonmonotonic accessibility to investigate diverging commuting experiences. We demonstrate this idea by performing a place-based analysis of commuting data disaggregated by poverty status in the Denver metropolitan area. We find that (1) unexpected commuting experiences do exist and constitute a signification portion of commutes; (2) accessibility variations that are generally not anticipated by traditional place-based metrics; and (3) expected and inverted commuting experiences exist adjacent to each other.

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.958398

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