On the basis of this literature review on `accessibility', a proposal has been made for a new measure of accessibility which can be used to estimate if jobs are accessible for the labour force. Generally speaking, accessibility relates to the amount of money, time and trouble required to travel from the place of origin to the desired destination (either for persons or goods). The literature review also showed the notion of `accessibility' to be multi-interpretable. `Accessibility' is only meaningful when it is clear, for instance, from what perspective and for what goal, activity, travel motivation and travel mode accessibility is applied. Even then, the usefulness of the different accessibility measures found in the literature strongly depends on the precise research issue. A measure was required to estimate the spatial attractiveness of living areas. The research issue in this review was limited to proposing a measure for use in estimating job accessibility from the perspective of living areas. The proposed measure is based on a `normal' actual accessibility measure. This kind of measure means calculating the number of jobs reachable in a certain amount of time, weighted for travel time (or distance). However, in these measures the competition for jobs within the labour force is not taken into account. This seems to be an omission, considering that the attractiveness of a living area is not only determined by the number of jobs in the area but also by the amount of competition for these jobs. If there are a lot of competitors in the area the chance of getting the desired job is lower than in a situation with no or few competitors. For this reason, an accessibility measure has been constructed on the basis of a `normal' actual accessibility measure corrected for competition in the labour force. Where the proposed accessibility measure was applied to a Netherlands' case study, the correction factor for labour force competition was found to affect the results. Job accessibility in all the Dutch living areas distinguished was found to change in comparison to calculations using the `normal' accessibility measure. (A)
Abstract