For those interested in spatial analysis and urban transportation, Daniel Herszenhut and I have written a book about urban accessibility and data analysis. The book is currently only available in Portuguese, but we are planning to share a version in English in the next few months. More details about the book below:

📖 Introduction to urban accessibility: a practical guide with R

The book is intended for teaching purposes, serving as a practical guide to model transport networks, calculate accessibility and evaluate the impact of transportation projects on urban accessibility. The book provides reproducible examples based on open data and software using the R programming language and tools. The publication is entirely online, but the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) will be publishing PDF and e-PUB versions of the book soon.

The book is divided into 5 sections:

1. The first section introduces the concept of urban accessibility, clarifies the differences between accessibility and mobility, and presents the main indicators used to measure urban accessibility.

2. The second section teaches how to compute urban accessibility estimates in R using the {r5r} and {accessibility} packages from open public data.

3. The third section introduces the GTFS specification for public transport data, and shows how to work with and analyze GTFS data using the {gtfstools} package

4. The fourth section presents a case study to illustrate how the combined knowledge from the previous chapters can be used to evaluate the impact of transportation projects on urban accessibility conditions

5. Finally, the fifth section shows how to download and analyze data from the Access to Opportunities Project (AOP) with the {aopdata} package to analyze the spatial and socioeconomic distribution of the conditions of access to opportunities in Brazilian cities. #aopdata

The book was entirely written with open source code in R and Quarto ( Github repo here) Now the icing on the cake 🍰 The code used in the book can be run in the cloud using Binder.

A few weeks ago, Daniel and I taught this book as hands-on workshop for the staff of the urban mobility secretariat in Brazil’s federal government. We hope the book and the workshop will help develop the necessary critical thinking and evidence-informed urban policy to promote more inclusive and just cities.