Measuring sustainable accessibility

Transport is one of the most significant sources of unsustainability in urban regional areas. This challenge is stimulating urban planners and decision makers to incorporate the concept of sustainability into their policy design at various levels. Despite its successful implementation in several sectors and wide recognition in academic and professional debate, sustainability is still not that evident in day-to-day regional planning practice. Interpretable measures integrating accessibility and sustainability and linking them with policy-making practice are relatively scarce. This paper aims to take some steps toward measuring sustainable accessibility, which in turn is intended to help regional planners define the potential problems and design possible alternatives at the strategic planning level for a sustainable regional transport and land use system. The proposed methodology for such measurement consists of the concept of conflicts in the planning process, job opportunity modeling, and sustainability and spatial conflict analysis. The Amsterdam urban region in the Netherlands is taken as a case study. Sustainable accessibility is measured in an integrated geographic information system environment, followed by corresponding policy implications for strategy design. The experimental study demonstrates that the indicator of sustainable accessibility can be incorporated into the process of strategic policy design.