Accessibility Indicators for Great Britain

Understanding how access to public transport varies across space is important in a wide variety of urban research. For instance, how is access related to risks of unemployment? How does access to urban amenities capitalise into land prices? Does good accessibility drive gentrification? Much research has focused on distance-based measures because they are straightforward to derive. However, they often assume access to a car since mobility is seen as being equally possible in all directions. This is not a justifiable assumption in many cases, particularly for lower income groups in urban areas. It would therefore be useful to have accessibility measures which assume travel by public transport.

The present work addresses this unmet need. It offers a series of accessibility indicators at the level of the Lower Super Output Area/Datazone (LSOA/DZ) covering the whole of Great Britain (GB) in the United Kingdom (UK). Indicators by public transport include a range of key amenities and services such as: employment; general practice (GP) surgery; hospital; grocery store; supermarket; primary school; secondary school; and urban centre.

Code to create the derived indicators is openly available for other researchers to use and customise in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/rafavdz/access_uk.