Glad to share our new paper showing how monetary costs can have profound effects in transport accessibility analysis and transport inequality estimates. The PDF of the paper can be downloaded here. The paper was led by Daniel Herszenhut as part of his master’s thesis.

• Herszenhut, D., Pereira, R. H. M., Portugal, L. da S., & Oliveira, M. H. de S. (2022). The impact of transit monetary costs on transport inequality. Journal of Transport Geography, 99, 103309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2022.103309

TL;DR: Most studies in the transport accessibility and equity literature only look at travel time restrictions. This implicitly holds the unrealistic assumption that all individuals equally face no transport budget constraints. In this study we show how simultaneously incorporating both travel time and monetary costs into accessibility measurement can significantly skew the conclusions of transportation equity analyses in a non-trivial manner. Although ignoring monetary costs leads to overestimated accessibility levels, it can either overestimate or underestimate inequality levels depending on the combination of temporal and monetary restrictions considered in the analysis and the spatial configuration of cities and transport networks.

ps. Daniel has passed his thesis defense with no correction and he has been a really important member of our team at the Access to Opportunities Project. Daniel has been doing some really nice work co-developing R packages for transport data and analysis, including gtfstool, r5r and gtfsio. We should keep an eye on his next steps.