Accessibility of Vulnerable Populations to Essential Opportunities: a Multimodal Approach with Application to Four Polish Cities

Abstract Accessibility to essential opportunities is one of key measures of sustainability and equity of transport systems. This paper provides an overview of previous studies in this field and introduces a new method for calculating a relative accessibility score that takes into account multimodal travel scenarios. The method is then applied to four second-tier Polish cities: Gdańsk, Kraków, Poznań and Wrocław. The study includes five different types of destinations: education, jobs, healthcare, retail, and green areas, and three sustainable modes of transport: walking, cycling, and public transport. Accessibility scores are compared to population distributions and indicators of spatial autocorrelation are used to identify areas of insufficient accessibility. Results suggest that the degree of equity in accessibility distribution varies across categories of destinations. The share of vulnerable residents in low accessibility clusters was higher for retail and green areas than for education, jobs, and healthcare. The proposed method can be useful in identifying areas of socio-economic vulnerability that require improvements in accessibility.