In this technical report, the problem of using conventional measures to evaluate personal accessibility is examined. It is argued that these measures ignore the situational complexities of activity-travel behavior and the role of space-time constraints in shaping the accessibility experience of individuals. As these factors bear significantly upon women's everyday lives, all conventional accessibility measures suffer from an inherent "gender bias" which is hitherto unnoticed. In view of these limitations of conventional accessibility measures, this study argues that defining accessibility as space-time feasibility instead of locational proximity would enable us to understand better the accessibility experience of individuals in their everyday lives. It proposes and provides formulations of alternative accessibility measures based on the construct of the space-time prism for studying gender differences in access to urban opportunities. To examine gender differences in individual accessibility, a network-based geographic information system (GIS) method was used to operationalize space-time measures based on the formulations of Burns (1979) and Kwan (1998). These methods were implemented using global positioning system- (GPS-) based trip data collected in the Lexington Area Travel Data Collection study (GPS), a digital transportation network, and a geographic database of all facilities in the study area. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting