Integrating People in Place-Based Accessibility Measures: Design and Application of a Mode Choice Accessibility Model

Conventional place-based accessibility is a useful indicator that quantifies the range of benefits available to a location and its residents. It is insufficient, however, for reflecting individual socioeconomic characteristics and the built environment in accessibility scores, as it assumes all individuals have the same level of accessibility within a given location. To address this limitation, this article introduces a novel place-based accessibility measure named mode choice accessibility. This new model, built by integrating a travel mode choice model, estimates accessibility based on the prediction of transportation mode considering individual characteristics and built environments. A comparative analysis revealed that traditional car accessibility tends to overestimate accessibility compared with mode choice accessibility. In addition, using hypothetical scenarios, we demonstrated that mode choice accessibility can capture accessibility gaps among individuals living in the same location. These findings suggest that mode choice accessibility enables a hypothetical evaluation of how infrastructure changes affect the accessibility level of a specific population group and highlights the diverse geographic landscapes of access to opportunities based on individual characteristics.