English version of the book on introduction to urban accessibility with R
In November 2022, Daniel Herszenhut and I released online the Portuguese version of our book “Introdução à acessibilidade urbana: um guia prático em R”. We are now glad to share the book is also available in English:
📖 Introduction to urban accessibility: a practical guide with R
A quick summary of the book:
The book aims to equip readers with the fundamental concepts, data analysis skills & tools needed to perform accessibility analyses and assess the impact of transp. projects. The book presents several reproducible examples using open source data sets and code in R. 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:
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The 1st section presents the concept of urban accessibility, clarifies the differences between accessibility and mobility, and presents the main indicators found in the literature to measure urban accessibility.
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The 2nd section teaches how to compute urban accessibility estimates in R using the {r5r} and {accessibility} packages from open public data, and how to visualize results with maps and charts.
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The 3rd section introduces the GTFS specification for public transport data, and shows how to work with and analyze GTFS data using the {gtfstools} package. It also shows where to find public transport data in GTFS format for cities across the globe, including Bazil
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The 4th section brings a case study to illustrate how the combined knowledge of previous chapters can be used to assess the impact of transportation policies on urban accessibility conditions and on inequalities in access to opportunities
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Finally, the 5th section shows how to download, analyze & visualize the data of the Access to Opportunities Project (AOP) using the {aopdata} package, which brings detailed data on landuse patterns & accessibility for different transport modes and years for 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 🍰 you can run the code used in the book online in your browser with Binder.
Daniel I wrote this book as a teaching material. We’ve already used it in a workshop with policy makers in Brazil & received some really nice feedback. We hope other workshops will follow in Brazil and abroad, and that the book will help students, researchers & practicioners improve urban policies.
