Project description

Although the complex interactions between land use and transport are often acknowledged and appreciated, the state of practice in evaluating infrastructure investment decisions is to fall back on purely transport- and mobility-related metrics. Especially when there is large economic inequality among citizens, answering the questions “Who gets the infrastructure benefits?” and “Who pays for the infrastructure?” become loaded and controversial.

In the project “MAXess: Measuring accessibility in policy evaluation”, we propose a more comprehensive metric, called “accessibility” that takes both land use and mobility into account. The metric is calculated at a disaggregate individual and household level allowing not only for results to be aggregated to a variety of useful levels, but to make the spread of the metric’s distribution measurable for the areas of the study area.

The project’s point of departure is the emerging body of knowledge regarding agent-based transport simulation and the associated synthetic populations. In the project, we aim to rely on open and freely available data to ensure that the use of the metric be duplicable everywhere, but especially beyond well-funded studies like citizen’s or NGO efforts.

As a decision support tool this project is significant in allowing decision makers to better evaluate how to spend the national budget in an inclusive manner, accounting for the economic and social heterogeneity of the population, and the transport mode variety. The resulting metrics will be made available through high resolution, open-source, adaptive maps that will allow decision and policy makers to intuitively and easily access the data to support their planning endeavors.

Funding agency

ERAfrica (within 7th EU Framework Programme)

Publications

See here.

Contact

Prof. Dr. Kai Nagel, TU Berlin

Dominik Ziemke, M.S., M.Sc., TU Berlin

Project partners

Prof. Dr. Johan Joubert, University of Pretoria

Prof. Dr. Kay W. Axhausen, ETH Zürich

Prof. Dr. John Bosco Kyalo Kiema, University of Nairobi

Dr. David Nyangau Siriba, University of Nairobi

Project webpage

There is only a pdf brochure of all ERAfrica projects: PDF

Our geoserver can be seen as a web-based project output from this project. Look under “layer preview”, or use its WMS or CSW or … capabilities from a GIS System.